I've been running a venerable WRT54GL with dd-wrt for the past decade or so, and a while back I purchased some Unifi hardware to replace it since it's staring to go flacky, plus I'd like 5GHz wifi since 2.4GHz is completely congested in my neighborhood at this point, and to that end a more advantageously located access point in a separate location from my router would help as well.
In hindsight rather impetuously, after a conversation with a networking acquaintance, I purchased the below hardware, which I only recently started working to implement:
- Unifi Secure Gateway Pro USG-Pro-4 (with Noctua fans replacement)
- Unifi AP AC Pro access point
- Unifi UC-CK Cloud Key
After banging my head against setting all this up, I'm basically ready to throw in the towel. Admittedly reactionary to the current internet environment, an additional factor is that I'm also rather privacy conscience nowadays (e.g. I use duckduckgo, noscript, et al.), and after making a lot of concessions in attempting to set this up, even if I got it working I'm concerned wouldn't feel particularly comfortable on that front. Maybe things would be better in both aspects if I had tried once of Ubiquiti's EdgeRouter options? But I didn't know about it at the time.
I still like the idea of a POE Unifi AP AC Pro access point giving me the flexibility of installing it in the most optimal location (networking cable already run), and to be honest its praise is what even got me looking at the Ubiquiti route to begin with. Another quite attractive aspect was the prospect of very long support i.e. security updates, because if I could get away with multi-decade network upgrade cycles, I would, so the longer security support the better.
Thoughts?
Perhaps there's an inexpensive, likelytobesupportedforalongtime, dd-wrt/tomato/whatever router that I can pair with the AP AC Pro, and that will do the trick? Help. I'm almost tempted to just spend the $$$ on whatever Linksys flagship flavor-of-the-year that supports dd-wrt/tomato/whatever, but that seems poor price/effectiveness, I'd be concerned about support length given the cost, and it would not have the attractive aspect of being able to mount the wifi access point in a separate location.