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by oaiey 1918 days ago
Ubiquiti Unifi is exactly in that spot. Looking Apple like good and considered business/professional (at least in this article .. we all know they have their problems).

Generally, I completely agree with you. The high-end products do not look fancy normally.

2 comments

For now... The stories of firing most of the US dev team in San Jose last year to outsource to cheap foreign dev teams and new product pushes like this bizarre frontrow life cam thing give me a lot of concern for the future of Ubiquiti. The past 3-4 years to this point were pretty great product-wise though. I'm pretty heavily invested in the Unifi ecosystem but have already started keeping an eye on the good stuff competitors like Mikrotik etc are making.

> https://www.frontrow.com/

I dunno, I'm in the process of replacing all my Ubiquiti gear, because:

- A firmware upgrade to my switch last year enabled some sort of loop detection that would shut off ports that my Google WiFi mesh was connected to (Ethernet backhaul). Support was nice, but ultimately unable to disable that new feature of the firmware. - My original camera NVR was flaky, possibly because of camera flakiness, partly also because it just couldn't keep up with 4 cameras. - Replaced NVR with CloudKey Gen 2, which was fairly nice but then brought the camera flakiness into full view. I would spend DAYS every quarter messing around with rebooting cameras to get them to reassociate with the Unifi Protect server. - A recent firmware update to the cameras left 4 out of 5 of them totally dead, unable to even be pinged, let alone associating with the Protect server.

On the plus side, the Unifi Protect mobile app is easily best in breed. Light years ahead of ReoLink or Hikvision or Montavue (I've played with all of them recently). The BlueIris mobile app seems to be pretty crappy, but I haven't shelled out the money to actually try it (based on the reviews).

I've replaced the switch with ebayed Enterprise gear, Aruba S2500 for <$100. Harder to set up, but did have enough knobs to disable the loop detection. A great PoE switch, plus it has 10Gb ports.

The cameras I've replace with MontaVue 4K cameras, which are amazing in low light. 10x the sensitivity of most other cameras in low light. I also got their DVR, which is ... meh. The mobile app is basically unusable for anything other than live view. The DVR is probably fine if you use it from a keyboard/monitor, but this is for my house and we really want a good mobile app, not some silly console. The cameras though! <chefs kiss>

It’s frustrating how UniFi things like the UDM-P require something at Ubiquiti’s end to be up for it to work properly.

You can still use the web gui when Ubiquiti’s stuff falls over, but the app stops working.

The equipment is far from rock solid, unlike the edge range in my experience. However the leaning curve with UniFi is very shallow compared to Edge.