SOHO Networks - What do you all use?

[CSGambill]

About 6 months ago I scrapped the single Netgear firewall/router/ap and completely re-built my home office network from scratch using a pfSense firewall/router and EnGenius switches and access points. I went with Engenius gear because they still offer completely on-prem management, no registration or cloud management tool necessary. They do offer a clould-based management tool, but I have an inherent distrust of this model. The configuration screens of the on-prem management tool aren't all that sexy, but are very straight-forward. Also, the network monitoring tools could be better and they only offer gigabit on-prem managed switchees, but are fine for what I do.

Anyway, I opted not to go with Ubiquiti Unifiy for a number of reasons, but primarily because of the mandatory account registration. I'm curious why Ubiquiti seems to completely dominate the market while Engenius seems to be relatively unknown, even though they pick up the slack where Unifi has some serious drawbacks.

Those of you who have small office networks, what equipment do you use? Anyone have experience with Engenius gear?

 

[plong]

About 6 months ago I scrapped the single Netgear firewall/router/ap and completely re-built my home office network from scratch using a pfSense firewall/router and EnGenius switches and access points. I went with Engenius gear because they still offer completely on-prem management, no registration or cloud management tool necessary. They do offer a clould-based management tool, but I have an inherent distrust of this model. The configuration screens of the on-prem management tool aren't all that sexy, but are very straight-forward. Also, the network monitoring tools could be better and they only offer gigabit on-prem managed switchees, but are fine for what I do.

Anyway, I opted not to go with Ubiquiti Unifiy for a number of reasons, but primarily because of the mandatory account registration. I'm curious why Ubiquiti seems to completely dominate the market while Engenius seems to be relatively unknown, even though they pick up the slack where Unifi has some serious drawbacks.

Those of you who have small office networks, what equipment do you use? Anyone have experience with Engenius gear?

Cisco, even at home... (NOT "designed by...") and: strongly agree re. premise managed...

 

[MediumSpeed]

I use SonicWalls for the NAT & VPN/SSLVPN router - they work well but support/updates costs money and IMO isn't that good. I use the Ubiquityi for WiFi, it is a little spendy but pretty fast/stable though their configuration interface could use a lot of improvement. I've used Engenius for WiFi in the past - was happy enough with it, just have more experience with the other products.

 

[mercracing]

We use Ubiquiti with great results. Why is it you have an issue with registering for an account for Unifi but didn’t here, or for email, etc…

 

[W54/XM-388]

Ubiquity used to be good until they put spyware "telemetry" in all their switches and refused to remove it and essentially said FU, if you use our switches we are going to get all your telemetry to use as we want and sell as we want. They also borked their whole home camera thing that was really good and tried to force you to use their own solutions for management / online accounts as well.

For our office we run pfsense as the firewall / router using a rackmount server and then run a bunch dell / Force10 enterprise network switches in gigabit ethernet and 10 gigabit fibre ethernet around the office.

For my house I went with similar Dell Enterprise Gigabit / 10 Gigabit Fibre switches.

 

[mmcmah]

Cisco, even at home... (NOT "designed by...") and: strongly agree re. premise managed...

Same. Cisco APs and Fortinet firewall, as the Cisco firewalls were too much for the speeds I needed. Service contracts for APs and firewall - while expensive, definitely worth it.

It really is a shame the Ubiquiti changed their camera software.

 

[Crush]

Mikrotik. Cheap enterprise hardware and software. No registration or cloud bs. Rock solid, fast and secure. Steep learning curve though if you don't know networking. Easy to configure though once you learn it.