I have used Ubiquiti for my home network for years, and it has always worked great at what it promised to do for me. People’s frustrations with it—in my experience—usually revolve around things they want it to do that it doesn’t, and the fact that it is very unfriendly to hacks or jury-rigging. So you have to be very sure going in that it matches your requirements. It’s like Apple gear.

Another option you could look at is TP-Link’s Omada system, which is basically their clone of Unifi but has a wider variety of hardware options.

I also often see people using Ubiquiti switches and APs in combination with a pfSense firewall if they want more sophistication and configurability. If you’re coming from Sophos and want to do sophisticated routing and filtering, you’ll probably find the Unifi firewall lacking in features (but it works great for people who don’t want to do that).

Yeah, this sounds like a classic from the “total bullshit L1 tech support will say with absolute confidence” files.

There is an outside possibility that there is some specific config setting on their bundled router that they don’t tell you about which causes traffic shaping to get applied to your connection if it’s not present, but that would be insane and illogical. If the new ISP-issued router actually improves your performance, that’ll probably be why. But like you, I bet it won’t.

The object at the top is called a Krone block. The bad news is that it is set up for telephone service. You see how the wires alternate blue, yellow, blue, yellow? If it was ready for data you would see a sequence of eight colours.

You would need to completely rewire this to get anything more than the current data port active. This is possible, but if you don’t own the property it may not be allowed. Does it belong to you?

It’s 66 block. Used for terminating and multiplexing phone connections. You can remove it and repurpose the cables for networking unless you need POTS for some reason.

I had a look at the manual for your router (PDF) and it does not appear to be able to broadcast more than one wifi network. One option is to replace your router, but another is to create a standalone access point just for those devices. You seem like someone who might have a spare Raspberry Pi lying around; do you? If so, you can use it to create a wireless network. It doesn’t even need to be connected to your router for this application.

How do I stop it all breeding 🤣

Sorry man. You’ve got the virus now.

Advice: you probably don’t need a bunch of single-purpose servers running up your power bill. Read up on containerisation and run as much stuff as you can in containers, on a single server. Docker and Proxmox will be your new best friends. You will have difficulty overtaxing a reasonably modern CPU, and RAM is (relatively) cheap.

You should not.

First, assuming its (cheap and poorly written) website is describing its capabilities correctly, it’s not an ad blocker, it’s a content filter grounded in a highly political view of the world. If you want more of that in your house, just watch Fox News.

Politics aside, it is a giant ripoff, asking the frankly ludicrous sum of -$569.99- $299 for something you could do with a $40 Raspberry Pi and a bunch of completely free filter lists that it is probably using behind the scenes anyway.

I’m confused about exactly what you’ve done when you say you tested the cable. You’ve verified the continuity of the run between each of the four jacks and one of the cables you terminated, and which is which? If so, what is going on with the cables terminated to the distribution board? I would expect them to be the cables going to the jacks and that you’d have to disconnect them.

(As another comment points out, there’s no sign of power to your switch but I assume it is PoE powered. If it isn’t… definitely check that first)