Ubiquiti networking gear
 

Does anyone have experience with this stuff? Our IT guy at work uses UniFi access points for all our offices. One of our microwave guys recently built a point to point connection with a pair of AirFibers to a remote island. It's all really cool, and priced a lot cheaper than the competing gear.

I really want to play with it but have no reason to. My home router runs perfectly fine. My dad's office (which I do IT for) is doing fine, though could probably use an AP or two (he's unconvinced). I'm trying to get my client at work (an island) to put in some AirFibers and NanoBeams for improved internet access to key facilities while they're waiting for their fiber to the home network to come online.

Anyone work with Ubiquiti stuff?

Our old building has single-band UAP access points and our new one has UAP-AC access points.

IT loves the UniFi controller software but they aren't convinced the AP's themselves are that special.

I'm thinking about installing several of the UAP-AC-LITE in my home with the Mac based controller.

I looked at getting the UAP-AC-PROs in my house. Ars had a really in depth review of them last fall:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/...-wi-fi-gear-is

Ultimately, I decided against them, because I read many users complaining on another forum (can't recall), that they run really hot. (heat = shortened life). To be fair, I think they are designed to be ceiling mounted and most reviewers who complained had them side mounted. Maybe they don't channel heat as well on their side...

I'm considering adding a UAP-AC-LITE or OpenMesh MR1750 to my current home which is 3-floors but requires me to keep my router/modem on the first floor (meaning mediocre reception on the 3rd floor) if some intermediate options don't pan out. I don't have much use for most of the advanced features but I'll likely a handful of wired APs distributed through my next home (early planning phases) given the size and ability to run Cat6 during the build.

At my current home I tried a cheap Cisco WiFi extended first which caused more problems than it fixed (poor or non-existent hand-offs, non-existent configuration options). I'm going to try a Netgear Powerline + AC Extender first, which worked well for a friend (on my recommendation) getting WiFi and Ethernet to his basement theater, plus I was able to snag the set for $6 after rebate on a NewEgg deal-of-the-day along with my old college .edu email address for student discount.

Yes, and I have found their products to be reliable and cost effective. I have a bunch of UAP-LR access points at client locations, and at home, and have yet to replace one. A pair of their NBE-M5-16 Nanobeams have been providing a 700 foot link for over a year with no maintenance. I have some Ubiquiti Edgerouters at client sites that have never needed rebooting except for updates. For the price, it is hard to beat them.

Have a friend in Texas who has probably dropped half a million bucks on Ubiquiti stuff over the years for his wireless ISP over the years. Aside from a few QC problems maybe 6-8 years ago, he's never had anything bad to say about them.

I honestly have no idea about the thermal engineering properties of drywall vs. suspended ceiling tiles. But I have to think the ceiling tiles do a better job of dissipating heat into the plenum than a drywall wall that might have insulation under it.

I like the Ubiquiti equipment at our office so much I bought one for the house, planning to set up a mesh to cover the whole house without the issues I'm having with the extenders et al. Thus far the one UAP-AC-PRO I have installed appears to be sufficient by itself, and I may not need a second. Very happy with the purchase.

As a previous poster mentioned, they do run a little hotter than some I have seen, although many have reported the issue is not as bad with the newer firmware releases.

I have 2 type of equipment from them : The EdgeRouter Light ( https://www.ubnt.com/edgemax/edgerouter-lite/ ) serving as our global router and connected to a 1 Gb Fiber (Singapore ViewQwest. They now offer up to 10 Gb for Residential ...). The 3 story house is completely wired so I rely on ethernet connection for desktops, NAS, network printers, Raspberry pi's, ip phone, etc.

I also use an UAP-Pro ( https://store.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap-pro.html ) for mobile devices. The entire house is covered with just one unit. The controller runs on a raspberry pi that also servs as an OSMC player. While it does run hot, despite the 30c degrees and the high humidity in singapore it has not failed on me.

I have about 25-30 devices online at any time. It does does a little more time to setup that a consumer device especially if you want to segment your network and use VLAN but once done you can just forget about it....

It has nothing to do with wall material or ceiling material or the price of tea in China. It's all about the heat dissipation of the AP. Many heat generating devices are designed to be cooled by air flowing over air channels. If said air channels are turned 90 degrees off design, air no longer flows optimally and the result is higher temperatures.

I use several dozen unifi AP's (both basic and the new 2nd gen AC models) scattered among various clients. The controller is indeed great (I run my own cloud controller on a VPS), since I can set each client as a site and manage them all from 1 place. I've started using a few of their unifi switches also.

For home use, I don't see much point, they would be fine, but personally I use a plain dual band AC router flashed with tomato firmware in WAP mode only. Does just as well, and was substantially cheaper than a AC-PRO model.

I have several of their Unifi APs on my home network (two inside and an outside AP for the backyard). Once they are setup, everything works great. I set up the controller as a Windows service, so it is always running in the background on my PC. You don't need it running at all (after setup) unless you want to use the guest portal.

THe coverage and zero handoff at the house has never been better.

I've been using Ubiquiti gear for ~5 years now. My longest link is 15 miles. Haven't used a CLEC/ILEC in years now.

We use a mix of Ubiquiti's gear. It's actually replaced the Cisco 1200 APs we used to use. If I'm just putting a single AP in a location or using it for backhaul/point-to-point, I'll use a Nanostation. For many locations this will cover the entire area.

If I'm doing a higher density (>40 WiFi devices) area, I'll use UniFis.

It is all rather mediocre but at an amazing price. I love it!

I have an EdgeRouter Lite here at home and it's pretty decent. Unfortunately performance suffers once you enable QoS due to not being able to take advantage of hardware offloading of various routing/NAT functions. However, it looks like it can handle TWC's 200/20 plan if you only do QoS on the uplink. (I was using a pfSense router on a x86 SBC before and could only pull off half of the bandwidth that the EdgeRouter can.)

Downside is that the Web GUI isn't all that great compared to consumer routers. It's fine for basic stuff but a lot beyond that really requires the command line to set up.