gfunkdave

As many of you know, my dad is a dentist and I manage most of his IT needs (he does have a local vendor he uses for stuff where someone needs to be in the office, but they're somewhat expensive and he prefers I deal with things...)

For the last few years I've been using two consumer grade Asus wifi routers for routing and wifi in his office. I put Tomato firmware on them. One is the main router and AP, while the other one is essentially just an AP. He has about 25-30 devices connected to his network at once, plus any patients or employees who connect their phones to the guest network.

A year or two ago, the Asus RT-N16 main router failed and we replaced it with an Asus RT-N66u (the same one I have at home), which has been working just fine.

Nonetheless, I'd like to upgrade him to some business-class hardware and was thinking buying a couple Ubiquity APs and an Ubiquity EdgeRouter PoE. What do people think of this? Is there another solution of similar quality and less price?

FastTrak2Elite

I'm not sure of a comparison, having never used Ubiquity, but check out Cisco Meraki line.

unmesh

I use Ubiquiti at home and am happy with it. Be warned that it needs a controller instance running on Java on top of Windows or Linux (I use a VM) for full functionality though it can be set up using a laptop or even a smartphone app. My reason for going to it from consumer gear was that my 5 AP home network (don't ask!) can be administered from one console. Some support from the vendor but mostly from the user community.

I considered Cisco Meraki because of its great reputation but the equipment is significantly more expensive and the controller is subscription based and in the cloud.

The latter is a "real" business solution (just works!) as compared to Ubiquiti which plays at being one.

tmiw

What does his current hardware not do right now that you wish it did? Are you having performance issues? Ubiquiti will probably work well enough but those questions might narrow things down some.

Personally I use a APU single board computer running pfSense + a D-Link DAP-2695 AP at home. I got fed up with the lack of reliability of even the more expensive consumer routers and decided that splitting everything up into separate components would be best. So far everything's worked pretty well except when I've gone and screwed stuff up on the router while "optimizing".

BTW, if you go with pfSense, enabling CODEL shaping on both WAN and LAN interfaces will likely be all you need QoS-wise. I've yet to cause latency issues when using up all of my bandwidth with this setup.

gfunkdave

Good point, thanks. His current setup with Tomato and a consumer router does everything I want - guest wifi with separate VLAN, site to site OpenVPN, internal DNS, robust QOS, etc.

I just have this feeling that I'd prefer to use more robust hardware in order to maximize reliability and throughput. The RT-N66u he's using now has been working like a champ for the last couple years (I have one at home that's been going longer), but the Asus router he used before that lasted a year or two and then died.

wdwright

I have been using the Ubiquiti APs and EdgeRouters at some clients for a couple of years now with no problems. I like that the APs are POE and can be managed from a single controller. I have a couple of the APs at home connected to an ASUS RT-N66U that have been trouble free. I also have a pair of Ubiquiti NBE-M5-16 airMAX NanoBeams running an 800 foot wireless bridge to a barn/shop and it has required no maintenance since it was installed. So my Ubiquiti experiences have been good - and affordable.

freecia

Ars did a writeup of the Ubuquiti UniFi access points a couple of months ago if you haven't seen it
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/...wi-fi-gear-is/
"this will be a reasonably skilled sysadmin’s review of how "enterprise-grade" Wi-Fi gear works in a home context, detailing how a home user can benefit from the improvements brought to the table by using business-class gear instead of an endless, endlessly breaking series of disposable home networking access points"

gfunkdave

Thanks, yeah - it was reading that review that made me realize I had better-priced choices than Cisco Aironet.

Dodge DeBoulet

"Endlessly breaking?"

I had a power supply go bad on a 10 year old WRT54G, but that's the only issue I've ever had with "home networking access points." Linksys, Netgear, Buffalo, Motorola . . . it's all still in working order (although not necessarily in use). My upgrades/replacements have been to support current technology and bandwidth requirements, not because anything has failed (I was planning on replacing that WRT54G anyway, but found a compatible power supply and my father-in-law has been using it for 5+ years now).