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Curious about any anecdotal stories about people using Ubiquiti stuff. A lot of the hardware sounds too good to be true, and in some cases it is (products are still being developed as they are being shipped) but I find it hard to hold that against them considering the pace that they are coming out with these things. Certainly it seems that they can't build their stuff fast enough, people are buying it out just about everywhere. It looks like one day in the near future, it might actually be possible to have a homogeneous network that you could administer from a single point (UniFi Controller). Any gerbils using any of it, on any scale? I'm curious about all of it, their switches, routers, APs, wireless backhaul.

Ubiquity wifi is dirt cheap access. Don't expect a lot of features or redundancy out of it. I see it a lot at places that give out free wifi access, airports especially. For enterprise access where you need to support throughput, qos, roaming, or anything else I would look at something else. I've heard good things on reddits /r/networking about their routers and switches but have no personal experience with them.

From the perspective one a one vendor solution I would be careful. Once they are in there using proprietary protocols you will have a difficult time bringing someone else in and interoperating in your network if you run into problems with the one vendor. Things have gotten a lot better now than they used to be but interoperability can always be an issue.

You're absolutely right about the one vendor thing, I'm just imagining scenarios where it would be more convenient than anything else (small place, limited resources, and you're probably the only person dealing with it). Currently it falls apart at the router level, as what they're currently offering is pretty basic.

I think UniFi actually has roaming when you couple their APs with their Controller software... it has some basic bandwidth controls, nothing too fancy. QoS, doesn't look like it (not in their routers either) unless you count WMM. Here's a naive question: how many places need QoS at the AP level?

We're actually in the process of deploying some point-to-point links using their equipment. We have three sites. From site 1 to 2 is ~4.3 miles, from site 2 to 3 is ~4.3 miles, and from site 3 back to 1 is ~8.5 miles or so. The 1<->2 primary link is a Gigabeam Gi-CORE setup (they're no longer in business, which sucks because the hardware is actually quite fast) with a Ubiquiti Rocket AC as a backup link. The 2<->3 primary link will be a Ubiquiti airFiber24 with a Rocket AC as the backup link. The 3<->1 link will just be a Rocket AC setup that will only be used if the link from 1-2 or 2-3 is completely fubar'ed. We use Extreme Networks gear and will be using a mixture of EAPS and ESLM (an Extreme feature similar to Cisco's UDLD) to pull off the redundant links.

Some of the links are currently online using loaner gear that's lower end Ubiquiti equipment than what the final solution will be. It's been pretty stable so far and wasn't difficult to setup.

Sounds like setting that up would be a nice crash course in wireless links. Is there an advantage of going with airFiber24 over airFiber5?

The airFiber24 has a slightly higher throughput rate. Plus since the airFiber5 is 5GHz we were worried about interference from the local WISP. When we purchased the Gigabeam equipment several years ago we looked at some other equipment and were told that we would be unhappy with it because the WISP had those bands saturated.

Even though the main product page doesn't state it, the 24 will also do full duplex. They are a little disingenuous with the quoted speeds though. They're quoting the aggregated full-duplex speed. So the advertised "1.4Gbps" is actually 700Mbps each way. They just came out with the airFiber24HD, which is 1Gbps full duplex (2Gbps aggregate). The reason I say it's disingenuous is because other network gear isn't advertised this way so it's a misleading until you read through the product documentation.

TwistedKestrel wrote:

Curious about any anecdotal stories about people using Ubiquiti stuff. A lot of the hardware sounds too good to be true, and in some cases it is (products are still being developed as they are being shipped) but I find it hard to hold that against them considering the pace that they are coming out with these things. Certainly it seems that they can't build their stuff fast enough, people are buying it out just about everywhere. It looks like one day in the near future, it might actually be possible to have a homogeneous network that you could administer from a single point (UniFi Controller). Any gerbils using any of it, on any scale? I'm curious about all of it, their switches, routers, APs, wireless backhaul.

It really depends on the product. From what I've seen of it so far, it's a poor-man's attempt at enterprise gear.

The Unifi access points generally rely on software installed on a computer to serve to configure them. Key to this is they rely on software installed on a single computer for the organization, and only recognize that original computer as the proper one for reconfiguring, even if you install the software on another system. This isn't as nice a setup as, say, Aruba, who uses a virtual controller on the access points, which has its own IP; you administer from that IP. The access points elect one as the master, and if that master goes down for any period of time, they elect a new unit as master --the whole system is self-contained. Of course, Aruba costs more, so you pays your money and takes your choice. Note that products from vendors like Aruba and Ruckus may have more advanced software when it comes to beamforming and ensuring best roaming in a multi-AP environment. If you're only looking only to cover a house with several APs though, Ubiquiti points are cheap, and while their AC point has a reputation for shorter range and throughput than a vendor like Ruckus, that low price is hard to ignore.

Ubiquiti's EdgeRouter Lite product (note: I haven't used them) have a reputation for being a bit clunky to configure, but having a fair amount of performance and configurability that reach far above the price point.

I did configure two Ubquiti AirRouters the other day. You can configure one as a router, and then slave several of them as bridges to that main router, a neat feature. They work well, provided you don't expect to be doing multiple 1080p video streams across them (as they are listed max 150Mbps, I believe they're probably single-stream 2.4GHz 802.11n).

From what I've seen, I think there are better products, but you pay more for those. Note also, when buying Ubiquiti, to closely check the PoE standards they use if you wish to do power-over-ethernet. Some Ubiquiti products in the past haven't been fully standards compliant, requiring their own injectors.

I'm curious about Ubiquiti too, as I'm in the market for a big-boy router and the EdgeRouter Lite appears to be the best choice, not to mention one of the cheapest. "Too good to be true" certainly came to my mind as well when they claimed their $100 box outperforms Cisco behemoths that cost more than a small car.

I don't follow the networking world very closely; are there any indications that EdgeRouter is becoming a real contender? I'm not professional IT, but it would be nice if any skills I pick up from playing with my home network would have strategic value in the future.

Speaking of WAP's, I'm curious what you guys think about some other brands. I haven't dealt with these much, but from what I've seen - the HS district I work for has Xirrus APs. They're awfully big (and fun to roll down the sidewalk - yes, that one was heading to ewaste anyway), and some cheap Realtek 2.4GHz cards seem to constantly have issues if power management is enabled. And then Aruba - generally fine, except that at my uni, people complain about the wifi dropping quite a bit. Seems to happen more with Apple stuff than others - sounds like overly aggressive power management to me. I run my own router (consumer grade Netgear WNDR3700v2) in my dorm, and don't get those issues, even though I do on their APs.

We use Ubiquiti stuff at our school and it works quite well. Version 3 of the software tends to crash a bit, causing me to restart it about once a week. Restarting the controller doesn't affect the AP's, just interrupts the reporting features.

Anecdote, you say? IT were put in charge of providing wireless for an interactive musical production alongside a Big Technical University on the East coast. Those with a smartphone were asked to participate. Total clients would be about 1000 on our end. The BTU on the other end ran lots of tests, but were unable to trip up the Ubiquiti setup and gave us the green light. We serviced several 'zones' that ended up with about 790 clients spread over 5 APs with nary a complaint. Not too shabby.

Anyway, if you're already looking at Ubiquiti gear, you're probably thinking about budgets. Nothing is better for cheaper, and some more expensive gear is not as good. The aforementioned Xirrus wi-fi stuff is geared towards high-density deployments like stadiums, big lecture halls, and the like. I talked to one school that bought them for regular wireless services and couldn't really recommend them. Now, if you've got the cash and a network engineer on staff, then either Meraki or Aruba will do you fine. Meraki has quite a lot of features, but Aruba has better training videos. Geeks on parade, yo.

Coming back to Ubiquiti, they don't have a lot of the gee-whiz features, but for general deployments, you don't need it and they're great! The AP Pro are the one to get, full 48V PoE, very stable, quite strong, and will service upwards of 100 clients before starting to sweat. General advice is to keep it around 25 clients per AP and/or 60' apart. More and more fruit-themed devices come with 802.11AC as standard, but Ubiquiti isn't there, and a good bet your infrastructure isn't there either. Hold off on that until you can.

As for compatibility, we've had great success with the Ubiquiti APs. The main issue is how power saving is handled on the client, which in most part is done correctly, except when it isn't. And then you get a user complaining that your wi-fi sucks, which with Ubiquiti and Apple clients, is not the case.

My experience with Ubiquiti radios ( I have NOT use their total solutions), but when my previous employer forced up to remove ALL our high-end Cisco radios and WLCS for Hautspot devices, The other other network managers and I bought Unbiquiti cards out of pocket, and yanked out all the Atheros radios out of the Huatespot enclosures and replaced them with Ubiquiti radios. TX and RX and recieve sesnsitivity improved dramatically. Customer complaints fell buy 65%.

Take my suggestion for whatever it worth. Now, on the other hand, i've head thru grapvine that Ubiquiti has greatly improved their management capabilities locally and remotely. Worth checking them out. See if Ubiquiti or your local vendor will be willing to let you trial them for 30days.

In the interest of full disclosure, nobody here listens to me anyway, so go ahead and try their suggestions first.

Ubiquiti APs and Unifi 2.x worked well at my previous position. The combination isn't going to do anything super sophisticated, but it covers the basic needs well. It's also has good support for remote deployments. Setup the AP in house then ship it to the location. As long as the AP can get to the Unifi controller, it will report and be programmable.

I was much happier with the Ubiquti APs and controller then I was with the Sonicwall stuff it replaced.

If you wipe out the controller, the APs will be lost until you reset them, so make sure you backup it up. Failover would be really nice, but it works fine without it.

There's more full featured stuff out there (Aruba, Ruckus, Mereki), but Ubiquiti hardware is solid. The software just doesn't have all the features to compete with the big players.

localhostrulez wrote:

cheap Realtek 2.4GHz cards seem to constantly have issues if power management is enabled. And then Aruba - generally fine, except that at my uni, people complain about the wifi dropping quite a bit. Seems to happen more with Apple stuff than others - sounds like overly aggressive power management to me. I run my own router (consumer grade Netgear WNDR3700v2) in my dorm, and don't get those issues, even though I do on their APs.

Realtek wifi cards are awful. Intel wifi is where it's at.

There could be a lot of reasons for that, so your one router versus a campus wide network isn't apples to apples.

drsauced wrote:

We use Ubiquiti stuff at our school and it works quite well. Version 3 of the software tends to crash a bit, causing me to restart it about once a week. Restarting the controller doesn't affect the AP's, just interrupts the reporting features.

Anecdote, you say? IT were put in charge of providing wireless for an interactive musical production alongside a Big Technical University on the East coast. Those with a smartphone were asked to participate. Total clients would be about 1000 on our end. The BTU on the other end ran lots of tests, but were unable to trip up the Ubiquiti setup and gave us the green light. We serviced several 'zones' that ended up with about 790 clients spread over 5 APs with nary a complaint. Not too shabby.

Anyway, if you're already looking at Ubiquiti gear, you're probably thinking about budgets. Nothing is better for cheaper, and some more expensive gear is not as good. The aforementioned Xirrus wi-fi stuff is geared towards high-density deployments like stadiums, big lecture halls, and the like. I talked to one school that bought them for regular wireless services and couldn't really recommend them. Now, if you've got the cash and a network engineer on staff, then either Meraki or Aruba will do you fine. Meraki has quite a lot of features, but Aruba has better training videos. Geeks on parade, yo.

Speaking of tons of clients per AP - I brought down those Xirrus APs so many times (well, got things not loading anyway) while enrolling tons of iPads into Lightspeed mobile manager. None of the iPads were doing anything intensive - just connecting, and phoning home. But I probably had a few hundred on at once in places, on a single AP or two. (And minimizing the amount of iPads on at once helped a ton.) That said, if Xirrus is meant for high-density deployments, what was with the issues here?

Flatland_Spider wrote:

Realtek wifi cards are awful. Intel wifi is where it's at.

Well, you'd be surprised at how badly my 7260AC in my t440s managed to f**k up until they finally pushed out a decent driver - a year and a half after the card was released. A lot of the drivers were horribly slow (as in, 802.11g could provide comparable speeds, and my Intel 5100 ran circles around the 7260AC despite being draft N), dropped a ton, and some made the wifi not work when resuming from sleep. I even had a BSOD or two that traced right back to the wifi driver. And I'm not the only one to report those issues. Some people said changing certain settings helped, others found it didn't, etc. How the drivers ever made it to production is beyond me. But now that they finally got a good driver out, it's working just fine. Really guys, was getting comparable performance to a 6-7 year old card that difficult?

That said, as the Realtek cards - really, if they can't make the card work with power management enabled, why enable power management at all? The cards DO work, but only if you disable 'allow computer to turn off this device to save power'.

I have used some Ubiquiti, and I have a friend that uses Ubiquiti as well. I only have experience with their WAPs and WiFi Bridges. I don't bother with their routers or switches, but that's because I'm quite fond of Cisco when it comes to those (their enterprise solutions, not their Small Business or Cisco by Linksys products... haven't found those to be reliable).

I haven't tried the 'new' Ubiquiti solutions, but I was really disappointed that their earlier stuff wasn't 802.3af compliant (are they 802.3af compliant now?). You had to use an Ubiquity power injector to deliver PoE.
Aside from that, they seemed to be good considering the price point. However, I personally am a HUGE fan of Ruckus Wireless' solutions.

This is the setup I like to run right now:
Cisco Router (1800/2800/1900/2900 Series)
Sophos UTM
Cisco 2960/3560 Switches
Ruckus ZoneFlex WAPs

localhostrulez wrote:

Well, you'd be surprised at how badly my 7260AC in my t440s managed to f**k up until they finally pushed out a decent driver - a year and a half after the card was released. A lot of the drivers were horribly slow (as in, 802.11g could provide comparable speeds, and my Intel 5100 ran circles around the 7260AC despite being draft N), dropped a ton, and some made the wifi not work when resuming from sleep. I even had a BSOD or two that traced right back to the wifi driver. And I'm not the only one to report those issues. Some people said changing certain settings helped, others found it didn't, etc. How the drivers ever made it to production is beyond me. But now that they finally got a good driver out, it's working just fine.

I skipped to the 7265AC since Bluetooth started being bundled with it.

The Ultimate-N 6300 was solid. It would pick up signals where other cards struggled. The Intel stuff has also been more compliant with whatever equipment it connects to, which was a great stress relief.

I'm pretty conservative about wireless standards, so I don't jump on board until it's fully established. Wireless is pretty complex as is, and the manufacturers have a tendency to push out half baked stuff.

I've heard lots of good things about their AirFiber24 units. I have had a couple at my site to connect a short 3/4 mile span, but I haven't had time to get the wiring ran to them. Hopefully I'll have some good things to report later this year.

I haven't used any of their wifi hardware, but I have an edgerouter lite at home at the front of my network and we also have one at my office that we've used for testing. My home setup used to be the FIOS ActionTec router + an older Linksys single-band N router running DDWRT, but I wanted a little more control over my network.

So now I have the FIOS thing acting as a straight MOCA bridge to the edgerouter, and off of that, a pair of Asus RT-AC66Us running DD-WRT as my wifi APs (got a pair of refurbed ones from Newegg during a flash sale).

I've been pretty impressed with it so far - I used to use a lot of Juniper stuff and I spend most of my time in Palo Alto hardware these days, but when I reworked my home setup I wanted something a little more capable than the usual home wifi router (but didn't want to scour ebay for a used Juniper SSG or something equally big/noisy). As with all routers/firewalls, the UI took a little while to learn, and I still think the way they create rules is a bit awkward (but Palo Alto has spoiled me for that). As I've dug more into it, I've been really pleased with the depth of functionality they offer to home users, especially for the price. Bonus: they've got a "wizard" that can be used for basic configuration, and it's super simple. So even if you're just jumping into it having only used the typical home router in the past, getting it turned on and working is pretty easy.

We've been considering trying out their wifi hardware in a few of our smaller offices, but no one on my team has any hands-on experience with them. So I'm glad to see so many have posted about those!

dextrous wrote:

I've heard lots of good things about their AirFiber24 units. I have had a couple at my site to connect a short 3/4 mile span, but I haven't had time to get the wiring ran to them. Hopefully I'll have some good things to report later this year.

I have a friend who uses AirFiber for remote well sites, and he likes them.

Flatland_Spider wrote:

localhostrulez wrote:

Well, you'd be surprised at how badly my 7260AC in my t440s managed to f**k up until they finally pushed out a decent driver - a year and a half after the card was released. A lot of the drivers were horribly slow (as in, 802.11g could provide comparable speeds, and my Intel 5100 ran circles around the 7260AC despite being draft N), dropped a ton, and some made the wifi not work when resuming from sleep. I even had a BSOD or two that traced right back to the wifi driver. And I'm not the only one to report those issues. Some people said changing certain settings helped, others found it didn't, etc. How the drivers ever made it to production is beyond me. But now that they finally got a good driver out, it's working just fine.

I skipped to the 7265AC since Bluetooth started being bundled with it.

The Ultimate-N 6300 was solid. It would pick up signals where other cards struggled. The Intel stuff has also been more compliant with whatever equipment it connects to, which was a great stress relief.

I'm pretty conservative about wireless standards, so I don't jump on board until it's fully established. Wireless is pretty complex as is, and the manufacturers have a tendency to push out half baked stuff.

The 7260AC also has BT - although up until the update that fixed everything, I never actually got it to work. Detected other devices and paired, but refused to actually connect. Seriously, who OK'd the 7260 with those original drivers? Might be worth noting that my 5100 (draft N 2.0?) has been pretty solid in the HP 6530b, even with the drivers that come with Windows 7 SP0. And the generic (separate) BT card in it also just works. Yet both wifi and BT (even 802.1n wifi, which is mostly what I use) were half-assed on the 7260AC for a long time. Come on Lenovo, you sold a $1200 business machine (t440s) with this crappy card that doesn't particularly work? I thought the whole point of business machines was they just freaking work, and they're easy to manage. If that means being a little late at adopting new hardware (as it often does), so be it. I didn't pay extra for nothing. And it's certainly not encouraging me to go back to Lenovo in the future (at least HP usually offers Broadcom cards - haven't seen Lenovo do that). Man, it almost seems like it's better to buy last year's model of stuff so that the firmware/driver bugs have been worked out. Like my router - that version is at least a few years old, and 802.11n, but it's been solid as a rock for me so far. No fuss, things just connect and get good speed. (Although newer versions are faster - not that I care about my 80mbps N wifi being slowish.)

A few of the APs at my uni are 802.11ac, so I get that on the t440s/7260AC. My own router is 802.11n (5GHz) though, and since that's enough for me, I don't foresee upgrading for a while.

Might be worth noting that although my experience with them is limited, I haven't seen any issues with Broadcom 802.11n cards at work (I know our HP 6460b's have them).

@deruberhanyok Gotta love how Palo Alto Networks is based on Santa Clara. Bugs me every time. (For those of you who don't know, Palo Alto and Santa Clara are both cities in the CA bay area that are pretty close to each other, maybe ~15mi apart. Silicon Valley territory.)