Originally Posted by
Error 601
I'm sorry if I was unclear.
The question would be whether or not you would trust the Edgerouter product for something that has to work and has to fail-over to another WAN elegantly.
Their anxiety is that replacing their existing legacy phone solution (which is entirely managed by the telco) will require expensive hardware to have the same level of resiliency that their Centrex solution has. You can buy a used enterprise grade PoE switch for practically nothing, VOIP phones aren't necessarily expensive but I have no informed opinion about traditional routers in this space. I have been using pfSense forever.
The EdgeRouter family is not expensive and Ubiquiti markets them as a carrier grade solution - but I think most people take Ubiquiti's self-placement with a grain of salt.
Ah I see, thanks for clarification. I run EdgeRouters at my house, my parents', mother in law, a friend's B&B, and I used to manage the network at my dad's dental office before he sold it. I've never had any trouble with the ERs. The one at my friends' B&B is configured for dual WAN - for some reason Comcast gave him two cable modems so we use them both (though in aggregation mode, not failover).
EdgeOS is the only non-consumer router platform I've used. I'm impressed at the feature level. I used to work at a telecom infrastructure design/build firm and the guy who ran the group that did cool point to point and wifi things sneered at me when I asked his opinion of Ubiquiti, saying "It's the Walmart brand". They market it as enterprise/carrier equipment but it really isn't, and I think that's largely because of the total lack of support Ubiquiti provides. True, unlike Cisco and its ilk they don't lock you into service contracts - because there are no service contracts. Support is very much self-service using their online forum (community.ui.com). If you're ok with that, and with the only real solution to "my device broke and I can't resuscitate it" being ordering a new one, then Ubiquiti is a good option.
As far as carrier-grade...I'm not totally sure how that's defined. I know there are a ton of people (mostly WISPs and fiber ISPs in the developing world) who use Ubiquiti throughout their networks and seem very pleased with it. My old company used Ubiquiti Airmax PTP to get a 800 Mbps connection to an island across 17 miles of open sea.
That said, I'd be leery of buying new EdgeRouters now. It has been a year or more since Ubiquiti issued a significant firmware release for them. They are in process of issuing version 2.0.9 hotfix 3, which fixes some old security issues but EdgeOS still runs on an old kernel that is EOL next year. EdgeRouters were hard to find in stock even before the current supply chain issues, and it has been three or more years since they released a new model. They have a habit of letting product lines languish like this and then suddenly announcing they're EOL. To many, it seemed the writing was on the wall. But a few months ago they went to the trouble of issuing a
statement saying that they remain committed to the platform. I'll wait until they start releasing new models or firmware upgrades that include new features and major improvements before feeling comfortable with the platform going forward..
If it were me and I wanted a router like an EdgeRouter now, I'd look at Mikrotik or PfSense. Or, if you don't mind running Ubiquiti's Unifi controller (free download), or you can pay them to host an instance for you) then there are several Unifi routing options that are as solid as the Edge platform and support dual WAN. I use Unifi APs for wifi everywhere and it is also very solid.
edit: just looked at my router and it has been up for 3.5 months now. I think I unplugged it accidentally then. Back in the days when Ubiquiti issued major firmware releases every six months I'd have six months of uptime when I went to upgrade it.