upstatemike

What about Grandstream as an alternative to Unifi? They ave a couple of dual WAN routers and it looks like you can manage router, switches, and APs from one interface.

Is the Dream Machine likely to be discounted for Prime Day? How about UniFi APs?

What do folks do for redundancy and disaster recovery? For example I was thinking about 2 24port switches instead of a single 48 port one to distribute risk. Also wondering if a spare Dream Machine is needed? Even with advance shipping, waiting for a replacement to arive could be a serious problem and without the Dream Machine everything is dead unless there is a way to use Ubiquity APs with whatever spare router you have on hand?

The Dream Router looks like it might cover the OP's requirements?

ESPHome is a pretty important thing to have fail if you use Home Assistant. Was this a one time issue or does it come back every once in awhile?

First thing I came across on Amazon. I should look at the Ubiquity website for current product info. Also not sure where to buy that is authorized so the warranty will be honored. The OP can probably scale down to a smaller gateway and single AP to meet his needs but UniFi should work for him as well.

So for example the OP and I might consider a USG-PRO-4 router, etc-24-POE Gene 2 switch, and some number of UAP-AC-PRO access points. Would that match what you are doing?

...cannot handle enough simultaneous connections.

Getting off Sonos, another Home Automation router issue I have seen is in trying to group a bunch of Amazon Echos for synchronized music. Even when they are all logged into the same SSID on an untagged LAN they will often refuse to link units connected to different APs with a "players must be on the same network" type of error. So what combination of router and APs or mesh system will avoid that?

I don't want to hijack this thread down a Sonos rabbit hole. I was just suggesting that it is an example of something that you would want to be sure a new router can handle well (if it applies to you) since it is a common device in Home Automation environments.

Maybe my router is the root cause (or route cause) of my problems rather than Sonos. More reason for me to follow this thread with interest.

Problems I have seen was when I connected too many Sonos Amps via ethernet and got some traffic loops with data going both wired and wireless (Spanning Tree issue). I have also tried using a single ethernet connection and everything else on SonosNet which solved that problem but created new challenges with range and interferance.

In the case of Sonos they use an older version of the Spanning Tree protocol that is not commonly supported in new routers or if it is, it isn't configured by default. This is why Sonos encourages users to stick to unmanaged switches to minimize the chance of a Spanning Tree issue (network storms). Also I have heard nightmare stories of people trying to find the right combination of settings to get Sonos to play nice on UniFi systems where some never get it to be 100% reliable. I would love if someone here could say that this problem has been resolved and Ubiquity works perfectly with Sonos now.

I don't have an answer... that is why this topic is interesting. I assume folks here are big Home Automation users so they face the same issues I do but maybe that is an incorrect assumption. I have about 200 reserved IP addresses in my router (a Peplink Balance One) with maybe 170 devices online at any given time with a 50/50 split between wired and wireless clients. I am surprised at the suggestion that you do not need to reserve addresses or that the router should not handle DHCP. With my router the DHCP table is what links the mac address to a device name and lets you group similiar devices into a specific IP range. I cannot picture troubleshooting my environment without this. I am also surprised folks don't consider dual WAN important. I guess I have never lived anyplace where ISPs were so reliable that you don't need a backup; especially if you also work from home in addition to regular Home Automation and entertainment consumption. I am a little surprised that many Home Automation folks would use a single router instead of multiple access points. Even if you can cover your whole house from a single location, the number of wireless connections trying to talk to a single device would make it suboptimal. I am also suprised there is not more concern about Sonos and other troublesome/special requirements type devices that are typical in HA environments, not only for entertainment but also commonly as the easiest path to TTS for platforms like Hubitat, Homeseer, and Home Assistant. I am not looking to challenge any of the views here but rather trying to learn new things which I might be able to apply to my own situation so I am interested to see what solution the OP ends up with.

This is an interesting topic in that none of the suggestions cover all of the points that I would consider critical: Dual Wan (so probably not a mesh system) Wired backhaul Good roaming control Flexible spanning tree settings to support legacy configurations for Sonos and similiar products (so probably not Unifi) Good compatibility with Amazon Echo which sometimes struggles when doing grouping in an environment spanning multiple APs or repeaters. Good DHCP support that can handle very large tables of reserved addresses and reliably respond to requests even under heavy loads