Ports and power. Run out of either and the job stops.
Cameras, access points, door readers and phones all take their power over the same cable that carries their data. The switch decides how many of them you can run, and it is the part people undersize.
Sized for the building, with room left over.
Count the devices you have, then add spares. The port you do not have is the one that costs a truck roll in two years.
Flex Mini
Five ports, palm sized. For the desk or the bench where one drop has to become four.
Lite 8 PoE
Eight ports, four of them powered. The usual answer for a house.
Ultra
Eight powered ports with a bigger budget, and a fanless case for a quiet room.
Pro 24 PoE
Twenty four powered ports, rack mounted. Where a building starts counting cameras in dozens.
Prices are all-in CAD, Ubiquiti’s own price including their memory surcharge, and we add nothing to them. They move when Ubiquiti moves them, so we confirm every line on the quote.
What actually matters when choosing one.
- Power budget, not just port count. Eight powered ports with a small budget will not run eight cameras. The total watts matter more than the number of holes.
- Port class matters too. A device needing PoE++ will not run on a PoE+ port no matter how much budget the switch has spare.
- Spares are cheap now. A back gate camera two years from now needs a port that exists today, or the switch gets replaced.
- Fanless where people sit. A rack in a closet can be loud. A switch behind a desk cannot.
We size it against the finished design.
Once the camera and access point count is settled, the switch answers itself. We order it with everything else so nothing is missing on install day.
Want the full detail? Switches and PoE in the wiki has the complete tables and the specs behind these choices.