A few months ago, I noticed that some of my IoT devices weren’t reliably connecting to my network or was quite slow. I rebooted the devices only to have them work for a little bit. I decided to reboot the access points (I have 3 in my house) and things got better for a little bit.

About 2 weeks ago, I rebooted the access point on the main level of our house (we have a split level house with an access point on each floor) and when the access point didn’t come back up, I power cycled the PoE port and when that didn’t work, I took the access point down and plugged it directly into the switch. At that point, I didn’t have much hope for the access point and started my research. I’ve been in the Ubiquiti ecosystem for a long time now; 2 of my 3 access points were sent to me by Ubiquiti to review them. I looked up when I purchased the 3rd one and it was just about 10 years ago! I decided to just replace all 3 access points with the U7 Lite even though I had 2 UAP-AC-Pro and 1 UAP-AC-LR which in theory might be better access points for WiFi 5 (most of my devices are WiFi 5).

As much as I hate to replace working equipment, I figure it is only a matter of time before the other 2 access points go belly up. While I had the one access point offline, so many things on my network didn’t quite work. I powered down most of the IoT devices and hard wired other devices (which was really something I should have done a long time ago given that the consistent gigabit speed to my equipment makes a huge difference), but still had slow speeds and trouble connecting.

It was easy for me to troubleshoot this issue and quickly replace/find a solution. For normal folks, I have no idea how they deal with their Internet especially as they add smart devices that may connect over WiFi.