Ubiquiti is not committed to supporting industry standards and prefers lock-in to their own service or limited partners.
I would avoid them for VoIP and they do not have a video conferencing solution yet.
Their innovative speed to market comes from selling beta products as “first release” and then not always iterating fast with bug fixes and solutions. Fine for consumer/prosumer, and some smb (small/medium business) but not a good fit for organizations with serious IT workflow and regimented procurement cycles.
Their ISP and WISP (wireless ISP) products are carrier-grade and enterprise-oriented, but the the rest of their line is still not a serious contender to true Enterprise gear from Cisco, Juniper, and many others in the corporate segment.
ex-Cisco guy that sells/supports UniFi for home/residential, so biased, but a balanced user/critic, not a unwavering fanboy of any brand.
That’s really our issue. We’re a small law office, currently using an Aruba (now HPE) instant-on switch and wireless access points. Those are fine for our needs so far. But whenever we update, I’ll be tempted to go Ubiquiti for the door control, etc. that we currently have on a separate system, hence the inquiry for our pending ugrade of our conference room system.
Often the devil is in the details, but a lot of Unifi’s new product lines can be purchased without wholesale conversion of everything to Unifi.
They heavily promote the integration and expansion of their product line, but keep in mind that one very effective strategy for security, reliability, and privacy is to not have all eggs in one basket.
If Unifi goes down, do you really want to lose both your networking and physical door access, for example?
The biggest hesitation, IMHO, is that Unifi has not embraced the Apple eco-system very much as so far they have eschewed any synergy with Apple HomeKit and their new line of sensors and IoT devices are completely proprietary.
Hobbyists and enthusiasts have built linkage to Home Assistant, but Unifi, so far, has ignored both the HA grownswell amongst DIY’rs and the big boys march (or slow trudge) towards better interoperability using the Matter standard.
I just started listening to this episode because I will transfer from TP to Ubiquiti this year.
But:
The product lines are extremely hard to understand. Too many options and to many products. Maybe I’ll understand once I’ve started to invest in it.
What units support mesh? I get different answers on different sites. Unfortunately I have very limited options to draw Ethernet in our 100 year old house, even though I know that a cable is better than radio waves. Will the episode cover mesh?
Ignoring the terrible marketing names, all current (in production), UniFi Wi-Fi access points support wireless mesh.
But depending upon your point of view and technical preference, UniFi still prefers that all Wi-Fi access point be hard-wired back to the router (gateway in UniFi lingo).
In the industry, this is called “wired backhaul” versus “wireless backhaul” which in consumer products is simply known as "mesh Wi-Fi).
The technical difference is UniFi does not have any access points with triple radios, all their access points are dual radio at most. (I am refering to radios, not antennas, that in itself is a confusing issue as every Wi-Fi device has multiple antennas and most support antenna diversity standards such as MIMO and beam forming.)
The simplistic view is that triple radios (like in Eero Pro, Netgear Orbi, and other consumer mesh-first products) allows one radio to be dedicated to client devices (phones, tablets, computers), one radio to be dedicated to older device that often interfere with everything else (2.4 GHz older devices, especially most smart home stuff), and a third radio for a dedicated wireless link back to to other wireless access points to build the mesh.
The more complicated answer is that Wi-Fi has advanced greatly and with antenna digital signal processing, and more advanced roaming and dynamic traffic analysis and routing, systems like UniFi claim to simply allocate the available radios and antennas as needed for all kinds of traffic whilst reserving one radio just for backhaul can be less efficient and wasteful of hardware resources?
I have been following this thread and listening to MPU about Ubiquiti and listening to ATP about Ubiquiti … and I have found it difficult to figure out how I feel about all of it.
Being a 40 year MAC user provides some indication that I appreciate elegant implementation of computer systems, especially human interfaces. Having spent almost all of my career designing Ethernet Bridges (or Ethernet Switches, if you prefer) that appreciation for elegant implementations extends to networking devices and their human interfaces. Hence, the discussions have intrigued me.
But … I am also (I believe) a fairly practical person. In spite of the fact that my home network has about 50 devices, performance is rarely an issue for me. I have 300 Mbps FiOS and other than some of my monthly archives to S3 I don’t find myself wishing I had more bandwidth. (that being said, i am sure that I will have a gigabit sometime in the next 5 years).
Do I need to spend $200 for a bridge if I can spend $100? Bridging technology is 40 years old and highly standardized. Yes, there are performance differences here and there but they are mostly at the margins. So, no, I probably don’t need to spend $200 for a bridge when I can spend $100.
Do I need an elegant integrated human interface to my networking equipment? Well, if I needed to spend a lot of time there, then definitely. But I don’t. One of the great benefits of Ethernet bridging is that is plug and play out of the box. Yes, there are a pile of extras that you can configure like LAG and VLANs, etc. I mostly don’t need it. I really dont want to spend time managing my home network. (and don’t forget, networking has been my career). And, all of the Ethernet bridges support the standards so they are, for the most part, interoperable.
Good wifi is important. Most things are wifi these days. If you can wire the backhaul everywhere then you don’t need mesh. I, like Mr. Sparks, have one location that requres wireless backhaul so I do use Eero mesh (replaced Orbi about a year ago). My Eero 6+ does very nicely.
Bottom line, if I were starting from ground zero the Ubiquiti stuff would be very tempting – there are aspects that do sound very nice, and a single vendor solution does have its benefits. But, in the end, I think I would still go with a less expensive, multi-vendor solution.
For someone that wants a more robust system than Eero can provide, but may not want the complexity of a Ubiquiti setup, I’d highly recommend looking at Firewalla.
One of my gripes with Ubiquiti is the underperforming CPU they often use. They will sell a firewall/gateway with 10GbE or SFP+ ports while advertising the IDS/IPS capability, but the system can’t actually handle line rate with those features enabled. Maybe that’s fine for most people, even with 10GbE in the house most are unlikely to saturate that. A good example is the Cloud Gateway Fiber. IDS/IPS throughput is only 5Gbps, add a VPN and that will crater. I wouldn’t be surprised if the VPN performance was under 500Mbps.
There is a steep cost increase form the Cloud Gateway Fiber to the comparable Firewalla Gold Pro. $279 to $889 respectively.
But what you get is a product that can actually handle the full line speed of the connections you give it. The software behind it is very well done and far more intuitive than I’ve found Ubiquiti products to be. Under the hood Firewalla is running Ubuntu and there’s a lot you can do with the system if you do want to tinker. I have Control-D for DNS running on mine and I love how it passes the system names along to Control-D from the local daemon on my Firewalla for simple management in the webUI.
A common comparison I’ve made between them, if you want to tinker and toy with your home network, get Ubiquiti. If you want a rock solid, zero fuss, intuitive system, get the Firewalla.
I’m manage a Fortune 500 enterprise private cloud during the day. I ran Ubiquiti for many years at home, and now the last thing I want to do is troubleshoot or tinker with my home network in my off time. I have a home lab for building, breaking, testing, and learning. I also don’t want to be on a business trip and get a call from home about the network not working.
I switched to Firewalla last year and it’s been great. I do wish they had a more robust ecosystem, but that’s coming. They have firewalls and access points now. A PoE switch is in development.
I tested one of the first Firewalla units and I was disappointed they were using ARP spoofing to accomplish some of their functionality for monitoring and controlling network traffic.
I’m sure this is the wrong venue, but I have a deep philosophical problem with supposedly “white hat” network products using “black hat” techniques to achieve their functionality.
As a matter of principle, I refuse to use or endorse such products.
(I understand their rationale, but I don’t agree with it.)
For what it’s worth, routers have been doing this on enterprise networks for years (decades even) in order to get DHCP to work across layer 3 boundaries.
Wouldn’t this only apply in certain configurations? Namely when the Firewalla isn’t configured as the router or is positioned down stream of the router. You don’t have to leverage ARP spoofing thankfully. See Deployment Topologies. They call this mode “Legacy”, which I hope means deprecated.
This may be TMI, but there’s always a “new kid” on the block claiming their product is better.
For the professional dealer/installer channel, Ubiquiti has been making inroads for many reasons mentioned on the podcast, but they’ve never really gotten love for being a true winner in raw performance.
So I was intrigued when Island Router, a newcomer to the market, but a company I have been watching, shot this performance chart into my email today.
I’m buying an Island Router in September. Currently using a Cloud Key Gen 2 so it’ll insert right into the head of the Network. In addition to performance i’m looking forward to managing when my boys access the internet and keep an eye on what is being viewed.
I use Wipr. I only use the Safari browser. I also have Stop The Madness, but not convinced it does anything really useful (plenty of madness with or without it).
I agree that the product lineup can be confusing at times, but over the last 8 years the Unifi product line really clicked with me. Over that time , I have replaced network products from other vendors with theirs so that now only my Moca adapters and cable modem aren’t Unifi devices.
I like the interface and prosumer features. They can be slow in adding features, like the CNAME record support that said “coming soon” for 2 years before they delivered it last week.
The mgmt interface can be inconsistent across clients. For example I might want to edit a DNS record from their iOS app, but then get directed to the Website in the mobile browser to do so. Small things like that.
Overall, I recommended their products, just be ready to do some research to find the right one before you buy it.
