Mar 15, 2013

The Unifi Installation – My Experience

One of the (many) reasons I’ve been excited about moving into the new place is because…it has Unifi! Thankfully my area has had it for quite some time.


We had the internal wiring done way back so we could do the skimming and painting safe in the knowledge that we wouldn’t be disrupted again by any more wall drilling. It’s worth getting it done earlier especially if it’s a new house and you’re doing some touch-ups or if you are doing renovation like we are.

Thankfully the subcon we had was really efficient and professional, he even helped us fit double LAN face-plates for the cables.

You also need to know which side the fiber cable will come from (front or back) and plan the equipment location accordingly (router, fibre termination box, modem & phone) plus then you have the IPTV STB which needs to be attached to the TV via HDMI.

I had a CAT5e cable pulled from the study to the living room for the Unifi IPTV so we could keep the modems etc out of the way and had the fiber cable outside hidden.

So far my experience with Unifi has been great, called them about 10-12 days ago and signed up. They took my details once, explained everything properly to me (installation procedure, plan cost, installation cost and so on) and arranged for installation on December 27th 2010.

The fee for installation since October 1st is now RM200 unless you sign up for the 20MB plan – then it’s waived.

Our original appointment was set for 2.30pm but the installer team called us from TTDI to let us know they’d finished their morning job and could come at 11am.

They arrived on time and were polite, professional and tidy. They explained everything properly and set-up everything nicely. And they brought along all these goodies with them! I almost mistook them for Santa!


From top to bottom – Panasonic DECT Cordless phone,  Huawei EchoLife HG850a GPON Terminal, D-Link DIR-615 Wireless Router and IPTV Set-top Box.

They got to work straight away pulling the fibre from the distribution pole to the house, there is a big mango tree in the way so it took a bit of time.


They also got to work inside in my study testing the fiber cable and making sure everything was ready to rock.


They did a very neat job outside and you can hardly see anything has been done at all!


The next part was to get the fiber terminated inside then get everything installed, the modem, the router and the phone. They couldn’t set up the IPTV as I don’t have a television right now :x


Then it was testing time! Everything worked fine, checked out the telephone – much clearer than our old one although there is a little lag when you dial a number. And call rates are CHEAP, all fixed lines calls are free and calls to mobile phones are 10sen per minute.

They asked me to grab my laptop and test the connection, so I did – guess what’s the first thing I did? Speedtest of course..


w00t – full speed and good latency. I did some International speed tests too – I got around 3.3MB to Europe and about 1.5MB to USA. I think TM are having some problems with the International backbone right now though so will see if it improves. Even at it’s slowest though it’s miles better than Streamyx!


I also installed the Speedtest app on my iPhone 4 and did a speed-test standing way out in the front yard – this is the result:

Let’s hope it stays fast and good, I might upgrade it later to 10MB – that’d be NAIS!

Anyway that’s my Unifi experience so far. From what I’ve read most people with FTTH (fiber to the home – for landed properties) installations are more than happy, but some with VDSL (high-rise installs) are having some problems – but then that’s to be expected as it’s still running over copper cable.

This article was written by shaolintiger posted by guest blogger you can also post yours contact me!

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