Ubiquiti announced a new round of enterprise campus switching on September 3: a 100G core switch, a rebuilt aggregation switch, and second-generation access switches with MACsec and a 100 gigabit stacking backplane. It is very good hardware.
It is also built for university campuses and multi-building corporate sites, and almost nobody we work with in Norfolk, Brant, Oxford or Haldimand needs a single piece of it.
The launch is a decent excuse to answer the question we actually get asked, which is simpler: what switch should I put in my shop, my office, my clinic?
Count ports and power before you look at speed
Two numbers settle most of the decision.
The first is how many things plug in with a cable. Count the access points, cameras, desk phones, printers, wired desktops, the point-of-sale terminal, the door controller and the recorder. Then add room. We plan for roughly 25 percent spare ports on a new install, because there is always one more device a year later, and adding a second switch after the fact costs more than buying the right one on day one.
The second number is how much of that gear draws Power over Ethernet, and how hungry it is. A PoE budget is a shared pool, not the sum of what each port could theoretically deliver. Outdoor cameras with heaters and current Wi-Fi 7 access points pull more than people expect, and a switch that looks fine on paper starts dropping devices on the first cold night. Our guide to PoE budgets walks through the arithmetic, and getting it wrong is still the most common sizing mistake we find in gear that was bought online.
Port speed comes third. A 20-person office running cloud software, card payments and a few cameras is nowhere near saturating gigabit to the desk.
The tiers, in plain terms
UniFi's switch range sorts into a few groups, and for small sites you will almost always land in one of the first three.
The compact ones (Flex Mini, Flex, and the 10 GbE Flex models) are small, quiet and fanless, and several can be powered over Ethernet themselves. We use these behind a reception desk, in a garage, or at the far end of a run where three or four things need a wired port and there is no room for anything bigger.
The Standard line covers 16 to 48 ports, is fanless, and supports up to PoE+. This is the workhorse for a retail unit, a farm office, a dental practice, a small warehouse. Most jobs we quote in Simcoe, Delhi, Port Dover and Waterford end up here.
The Professional line adds real Layer 3 routing, higher PoE capacity and faster ports. Pro Max models bring 2.5 GbE across 16 to 48 ports; the Pro XG models step up to 10 gigabit with PoE++ for cameras and access points that need it. You want this tier when you have multiple VLANs doing serious work, a lot of high-draw PoE, or a server and NVR that genuinely move large files.
Above that sits the enterprise campus gear from last week's announcement. If your building has fibre risers and more than a few hundred users, call us. Otherwise, skip it.
Where faster ports actually earn their money
There are three situations where we push a client up a tier rather than saving them the money.
Video, first. A recorder writing eight or more high-resolution cameras, plus staff pulling footage for an insurance claim, will notice the difference between gigabit and 2.5 gigabit on the recorder's own port.
Second, Wi-Fi 7 access points. If you are paying for a Wi-Fi 7 AP and feeding it a gigabit port, you have capped the thing you just bought. That does not always matter, but it should be a decision rather than an accident.
Third, anything with a real file server or design workstations. Cabinet shops, print shops and engineering offices move files that make the uplink the bottleneck.
Everything else is fine on gigabit for years yet.
What to watch for
Fan noise is the one people forget. Several of the larger PoE switches have fans, and a fan in a closet behind a consulting room or beside a front desk is a daily annoyance. We site those in a proper enclosure with airflow, which is half of what our network closet checklist is about.
Heat is the other one. A switch pushing 300 watts of PoE in a sealed cupboard in July will throttle or fail early. Ventilation is not optional.
And check the uplink. A perfectly good access switch bottlenecked by a single gigabit link back to the gateway is a common find when we do an office network review.
What we charge
Hardware starting points, quoted in writing before anything is ordered: Switch Lite 8 PoE from $169, Switch 24 PoE from $580, Switch Pro Max 16 PoE from $639, Switch Pro Max 24 PoE from $1,220.
Technician labour is $135 an hour locally and $150 an hour on the Hamilton, Burlington and Oakville side. A full network audit, where we document what you have and what it should be, is $495. If you are further out, visits 31 to 60 minutes from our Norfolk base start at $395 and 60-plus minutes start at $595, and the day's work counts toward that minimum. There is no minimum close to home.
Ongoing updates, backups and monitoring sit under UniFi managed services, from $49 a month for a home and from $325 a month for business Care plans.
If you are replacing an unmanaged switch, adding cameras, or just tired of guessing which box to buy, get in touch and we will size it properly. We cover Norfolk, Oxford, Brant, Haldimand and the Hamilton to Oakville corridor.
Sources
- Introducing: Next-Gen Enterprise Networking (Ubiquiti blog, September 3, 2026)
- UniFi Switching product range
- Ubiquiti Store Canada, switching
- Ubiquiti: What's New
Cabling, networks, cameras, access control, smart homes, hosting and software for homes and small business across Southwestern Ontario. Twenty-plus years in the trade, and we still answer the phone.