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by paulgerhardt 2446 days ago
I finally switched to UniFi equipment after hearing for years how much better it is than consumer WiFi equipment.

Oh man, what a headache.

Depending how one configured things, there’s at least 3 ways to provision devices - all 3 incompatible and will cause issues with each other. User manuals refer to Apps no longer in existence. In no instance have I had a “just works” experience. In two instances the option I needed to configure was not available through any of the 3 (4?) dashboards and I had to resort to sshing into the device.

4 weeks later I’m still experiencing ISP fiber modem disconnect issues every 48 hours and can not connect remotely to debug. The impression I get is 90% of the performance “gains” one gets from switching from Asus to Ubiquiti come from dedicating one $300 piece of hardware (which overheats) for each network function (firewall, switch, router, AP) rather than using a single threaded all-in-one device. Then people still bolt on accessory devices like pi-holes when a USG should be perfectly capable of performing the task.

3 comments

The provisioning was a PITA and I only use the WiFi access point, not their router, but at least for me the WiFi reliability and signal quality is night-and-day compared to my "old" (2015/6-era) TP-Link Archer C7 router/WAP. I'm not sure what design details lead to this -- poking around via SSH, they're just running Linux with hostapd controlling Atheros interfaces (perhaps just solid engineering on antennas plus choosing a well-supported WiFi chipset?) -- but qualitatively there is definitely a difference in my experience!
I'm not a big fan of their Ubiquiti Device Discovery Tool, I always recommend using SSH method for adoption which is very reliable: https://support.hostifi.net/en/articles/3044211-unifi-cloud-...
They have a UDM and UDM-Pro in early acces that handles the all-in-one device scenario you mentioned.
I'm not sure if this all-in-one game is going to work. IMO, Unifi's hardware apart from their Wireless offerings is limited compared to other players in a similar price range. They should stick to what they're best at, which for me is their Wireless range and build around that.

In our case, we ended up using Mikrotik devices for our physical layers and Unifi as our APs. So far, the performance of the Wifi devices is excellent (though tuning high density configs was a bit of a pain), and the Mikrotiks give us exceptional control over the behaviour of the network topology.

Playing to the strengths of each vendor was the way to go for us. Worked out way cheaper as well.