Upgraded from Orbi to UDMSE (AT&T Fiber)

Finally found time to upgrade my Orbi to full Ubiquiti. I purchased everything a few months ago but I was a hesitant to do the cutover out of fear I would completely destroy my internet access. So, for any beginner out there afraid to take the plunge, it is possible.

I’ll summarize what I did below. Just an FYI, but my existing Orbi setup was such that the BGW320 was setup as the router and my Orbi was acting like an access point. The WiFi on the BGW was already turned off.

  1. I pre-wired everything I could ahead of time. This included a Lite 8 POE switch and two U7 Wall APs, all connected to the UDMSE (which was without power).
  2. I had the unifi app loaded on my iPad with an account already created. I also had my laptop nearby with an Ethernet cable ready to go.
  3. I unplugged the power cord for all of my Orbis. This is really important because if you just disconnect the Ethernet, the orbis will still be broadcasting the SSiD and your devices will not connect to the UDMSE.
  4. I connected the BGW to the UDMSE then plugged in the UDMSE.
  5. The UDMSE booted up and I opened up the app on my iPad. It found the UDMSE and started the setup process. I also plugged in my laptop and was able to login via a browser and using the ip address found in the small screen of the UDMSE.
  6. I won’t go into too many details here but after it went through the update process I adopted all of the devices connected to the UDMSE.
  7. The app and software were both brand new to me and it wasn’t very intuitive to my newbie eyes. I was able to setup a few networks and WiFi’s with the help of YouTube. However, the unifi software in all of the YouTube videos I watched looked nothing like the software I saw on my iPad or laptop.
  8. I went to security and turned on detect and block.
  9. Everything seemed to work at this point.
  10. I then turned my attention to my BGW320.
  11. I logged into my BGW320 using the default IP address. Just an FYI, but the UDMSE defaulted to an ip address that was different than the 192.168.1 address.
  12. I went to firewall > IP Passthrough and changed the allocation mode to passthough and DHCPS-Fixed.
  13. I searched for the UDMSE’s MAC address on the small screen on the front and manually entered that in the passthrough fixed MAC address setting.
  14. After saving, I went to Firewall > Firewall Advanced and turned everything off. I also turned off packet filtering, but I forgot where that setting was. Also, my WiFi on the BGW was already off, so turn it off if you haven’t already done so.
  15. I ended rebooting the UDMSE after making the changes on the BGW320 and that’s it.

So far, everything works great. I did more fine tuning after the fact including fine tuning the radio settings, increasing the 5 GHz bandwidth to 80 and lowering the transmit power to medium. I also manually chose channels for the 2.4 but left the 5 in auto for now. I may fine tune more as I learn more.