Comment by kkapelon
10 hours ago
Unifi is the Apple of networking gear. When something new is released the HN crowd is excited even when the same functionality existed already with another company.
10 hours ago
Unifi is the Apple of networking gear. When something new is released the HN crowd is excited even when the same functionality existed already with another company.
Unifi is a bit different than Apple to me.
Ubiquiti is one of the few companies doing prosumer hardware - and doing it extremely well. They give you access to advanced, raw configurations without necessarily having to go "full enterprise" deployment. They also have solutions for just about everything.
That being said, I generally have moved towards other Wifi solutions as I've grown weary of tweaking Ubiquiti all of the time. I found that I could get better top-end performance out of Ubiquiti gear, but really struggled to hammer out poor performance in edge cases. Particularly, with jitter and random latency spikes.
My consumer mesh wifi system gets nowhere near it's advertised performance, with little way for me to tweak it. However, I rarely need "full performance" and it doesn't suffer from the same random glitches.
Where they differ also from Apple, and indeed is insanely amazing for a network hw company is that I'm still getting software updates for my , I don't know, at least 7 years old AP. A consumer device.
This is unprecedented and much appreciated.
I used to think the same way, and I loved UBNT. Sadly, after 2 different more advanced configs I had caused wild stability issues - affecting APs, a USG and the controller itself to the point of making them less reliable than a random TP-Link router, plus an ERL randomly dying on me without warning and never booting again - I decided to pull UBNT from anything and anywhere.
I now exclusively use open-source projects with a strong history and community - or used high-end enterprise gear that I pick up when it reaches EOL so it's dirt cheap. Stability has been so much better, even with the most advanced configs I ever created.
I've moved to buying last gen used Ruckus Unleashed APs (usually R720 as they are cheap and very reliable). Way higher quality but steep learning curve for many functions, although if someone is willing to put in some effort it's not that bad.
I was having issues with Wi-Fi stability but, once the settings were dialed incorrectly, it's been rock solid over a year.
What do you recommend as an alternative?
I still like them. I have almost no real complaints about their products. They just work for me. Here is an example: I had a Netgate with pfsense for my home gateway. My primary home internet provider can be a little flaky, so I have a beefy 5G gateway backup. It was way too hard to configure one of the ports to support automatic WAN failover. The, less expensive, unifi product just worked. It was just a simple setting in the gateway's management UI. The information provided in the dashboard is rich and it implements things like constant QoS monitoring that has a nice plot. It adopts and manages my home wifi and makes it super easy to configure channels, analyze congestion, and do all the deeper technical configuration I could ask for.
Another example, I had Frigate set up on a home rolled NAS. Again, it worked alright, but it always stole time from me. It always needed a little maintenance or tweaking or thinking. I bought a UNVR and modern Unifi cameras. Adopted, zero thinking or management from me. I still retain control of my data and it respects my privacy. It isn't perfect, but at the price point it solved meaningful problems I cared about in both cases. Yes they are commercial products and not open source, but they are priced reasonably to my eyes (the UCG ultra was actually cheaper than the netgate). That makes me a happy customer.
I have run their wifi APs for over a decade with no problems. It's not perfect, I know there are still privacy concerns. No company is really perfect, but they are good to me.
The corollary to them just working is that if they don't, they don't just ignore you like Apple. I reported a bug between two pieces of their hardware when talking to a specific 5Gbe NIC via their support without a support contract. They took a week to get back to me with a member of their QA department talking directly with me and having me validate beta firmware with them. After about a week of back-and-forth, they had a fixed version that has been deployed globally to everyone.
Meanwhile, Apple still hasn't fixed bugs that I reported to them between 2012 and 2014 while working for one of the largest universities in North America as a level 2 tech.
More like the Sonos of networking gear, in that they were once kinda cool but squandered it with questionable product decisions.
Ah, so what you're saying is that they're the Apple of networking gear.
Good one.
They have always been stuck between prosumer, pro business, and enterprise.
They have tried to go subscription based licensing but that can be conflicting for companies who just want decent reliable network gear in all the above market segments.
I fit in the prosumer category and have about $10,000 in gear and while it's great for my needs I don't see myself ever spending money for network gear subscriptions.
It is nice stuff. I have several UniFi devices in a 2200 sq foot old house that are wired on Ethernet and the WiFi is great everywhere. They also have a line of point-to-point modified WiFi radios for long range links and it took about 30 minutes to set up a link between my house and another house on the property.
That is fair, though they at least walked back some of those, and self-hosting is still very much a thing if you prefer not to deal with configuring your system through Someone Else's Computer.
They made some good decisions aswell in the recent past, looking at their firewall configuration features (made it zone based).. All in all their eco system is worth it imo and the hardware is actually affordable. On the other hand I had some mikrotik gear in the past which was also really good, the user interface is just not as shiny ;-)
On the Sonos tangent: the hardware is really good! But the software is just staggeringly, aggressively, and proactively terrible. :(
Can it be reflashed
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Hear hear!
For wireless, the prices aren’t much different from products with comparable feature sets/performance. For some niche combinations, they’re the only option that doesn’t force you way upmarket (Meraki, etc.). Most of the money they make is from small business and tiny WISPs, not HN boosters overdoing it on their home WiFi in what must be a bid to get their partner to divorce them.
Their wired stuff is a total scam since Edgerouter fell off, though. The same functionality exists on a $50 netgear managed switch (or wired router, etc.), and the shitty unified configuration interface doesn’t justify the markup at all.
To be somewhat fair, the quality of their management tools for their switches and routers has increased somewhat, and some of their wired routers are actually decent on the price/performance spectrum these days.
Meanwhile, the quality of their competitors’ tools for managing multiple switches without manually configuring each one, individually, over SSH or via a graphical tool is not necessarily amazing.
For example, it’s been a while since I used Ruckus Unleashed (the low-end management tool from an very upmarket vendor), but I think UniFi Network (the management tool) is a good amount better than Unleashed.
I really wish the people who put so much effort into software like OpenWRT would put some of that effort into managing multiple devices in a nice, unified manner. The tooling could be so much better.
> I really wish the people who put so much effort into software like OpenWRT would put some of that effort into managing multiple devices in a nice, unified manner. The tooling could be so much better.
There is OpenWISP: Leveraging Linux OpenWrt, OpenWISP is an open-source solution for efficient IT network deployment, monitoring & management.
>HN boosters overdoing it on their home WiFi in what must be a bid to get their partner to divorce them..
Au contraire!
I got tired of the refrain "are you messing with the network again?" in the evenings when the neighbors are all streaming Netflix and crowding the airwaves, so I installed several low power UI APs around the house and and popped my own DNS and devices to a separate VLAN.
No more complaints :)
I do wish Unifi offered more configuration in the ad-blocking department, but I'm hesitant to inflict anything but the most vanilla deployment on the remainder of the household..
Unless UI spins up their own dns business, I have had good luck using nextdns.io at home to close that gap.
I haven't really seen cheaper overall solutions for medium-sized home deployments than their gear. I need a layer 3 switch with 1 SFP+ 10Gbe port, and at least 5 1/2.5/5/10 Gbe copper ports with POE++ on at least 2 ports. I cannot find a cheaper solution that the USW-Pro-XG-8-PoE from any vendor. If you know one, please let me know.
Sure some of their hardware is overpriced, but they're pushing the limits of what's available in the 10 and 25 Gbe areas at relatively reasonable prices.
Netgear 5 port managed switch: $30 https://www.netgear.com/business/wired/switches/easy-smart/g...
Ubiquiti 5 port managed switch: $30 https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-switching/products/u...
Netgear 24 port managed switch: $260 (with a 1 year subscription included!) https://www.netgear.com/business/wired/switches/smart-cloud/...
Ubiquiti 24 port managed switch: $225 https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-switching/products/u...
Sorry, but what markup are you referring to?
I'm sure you can find price differences at different products & tiers, but quickly glancing around it sure doesn't look like Ubiquiti has any particular premium markup.
Regardless having a self-hosted, buy-it-and-own-it, non-business friendly product line absolutely has value. I loved my mikrotik switches when I was just messing around, but the single pane of glass, central management is not insignificant when time becomes a more precious resource and you just need it to work.
The Ubiquiti 5 port switch is actually better than the Netgear one because it's POE powered whereas I don't think the Netgear one is.
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They have the form-over-function aspect too, in that they decided to keep the external design language consistent across the board no matter what. Which meant they couldn't improve the passive heat dissipation enough to keep up with newer network standards, and had to resort to putting fans in their WiFi APs to keep them from overheating.
And they make the whole claim of 'minimalism means easy to use for power users', which really means 'we'll keep messing with how the meshing in your house works so that you're unable to pin preferred routes between nodes - because without seeing your house we know better'.
Uplink priority doesn't work?
Which units is that? I have a pair of u7 pros in my house and they’ve never made a peep, though admittedly they don’t get pushed very hard at all; the TV and two main computers are wired, so it’s really just iot junk and phones on the wifi.
The U7 Pros do have a fan, but yeah if you're not pushing them very hard it may not be spinning up.
https://youtu.be/IStbaTQTBio?t=117
Aside from noise it's also not ideal for reliability in dusty environments.
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To be fair, they have a nice ecosystem for networking nerds. I got a Dream Router last week for black friday and I'm super happy with it. Setup was like 20 seconds.
I'm looking forward to getting more Unifi gear in the near future.
I've got some old Unifi gear and there's a couple of things that make them unlike Apple.
Firstly, I can run the network controller easily in Linux (in Docker as it happens, but the image is third party - jacobalberty/unifi). It's happily running on Raspberry Pi.
Secondly, I've got one really old access point that is now unsupported for updates, but apart from that, there's no problem with controlling it along with the supported ones.
Also, I don't need a cloud connection though they do encourage using one.
> Unifi is the Apple of networking gear
They were founded by some people that left Apple.
Ah, this is a Ubiquity product. That explains it.
Why did AVM or Netgear Orbi not get this treatment for "works", though?
AVM is great for single-owner use with sub 20 devices.
Unifi is great for small IT companies providing network services to tens of costumers. Being able to manage everything remotely (and even batch things for all of your customers) is great.
No experience with AVM, but Ubiquiti gear is at least a class above Netgear equipment.
Because Unifi is more focused on the needs of businesses and enthusiasts. AVM and Netgear Orbi are products for the consumer market. So they miss a the advanced features Unifi supports.
Unifi is used by the tech-savvy homeowner that needs PoE for their security cameras and wants to control and configure their network without needing a network engineer.
And also Unifi lets you just buy stuff instead of "contact a sales rep". If I go to Netgear and filter primary port speed to 2.5g, which is hardly an enterprise spec, all 3 options are "contact a rep" which... no thanks. Who on earth wants to contact a sales rep for a 10 port 2.5gb switch?
There is now also TP-Link's Omada line at least which seems like the most comparable alternative.
I tried out Netgear Orbi and I don't know who it's actually for. It tried deploying it at my dad's place, but had to return it because it just doesn't work. Dropped in Ubiquiti gear to replace it and I had the entire network up and running within 15 minutes of applying power. And it's had zero of the issues that I had with Netgear's system.
Small aside, AVM have now formally rebranded as "FRITZ!"
the founder himself was an Apple hardware designer
Apple of networking? I suppose no OpenWrt then.
You actually can install Openwrt on bunch of their hardware
I recently bought their cloud fiber gateway and two in wall wifi 7 access points because I'm setting up a network in my new apartment and hear this multiple times.
Honestly they are nothing like Apple - like just look at their mobile apps - how many do they have - 10 ? To interact with the same gateway just for slightly different use-cases. Not to mention that the functionalities are hard to decipher