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.
This seems like a stretch. If your position is that the REAL experts are using Cisco gear instead, I guess fine. But the "HN Crowd" loves using Ubiquiti at home because it is light years better than any consumer brand, (1) in terms of giving people who know what they're doing sufficient control to do so, (2) in terms of performance, and (3) in terms of not being a buggy piece of crap.
Contrast with:
(1) eero has no web UI (ONLY mobile phone!) and almost zero network configurability. You can't set a hostname for instance for DHCP. You can have exactly one main and one guest network. You don't get to configure anything about it though. Etc.
(3) I bought a Linksys replacement for my Eeros to get 6E -- I returned it to the store due to how horrifyingly bad the Web UI was and how bad the "app" was too. AND it also had flaws like inability to have reservation IPs outside the DHCP pool range.
Apple is actually the opposite of Ubiquiti -- they don't want you to be able to configure anything or have any visibility into anything. It either 'just works' or just silently fails or fails with "An error occurred."
Ubiquiti at home because it is light years better than any consumer brand
As someone who simply wanted to isolate different devices on my home network, I was looking at nearly thousands of dollars of hardware, installing abstract OpenWRT software, and arduous VLAN rules to do this. It was shocking how immature this space is. I finally caved to the ubiquiti setup and am glad I did.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Usually, I use Mikrotik wAP ACs for this kind of thing. They're cheap-enough to buy brand new, and they're designed to be able to work outdoors in the weather.
But I might pick up an R720 just to play with -- that's a different echelon of gear.
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.
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 ;-)
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
I have developed a deep dislike for UI overall through the years due to their many missteps (see: most of this thread), but those little PoE-powered 2.5G switches are amazing and I am surprised that while 2.5G is getting more and more popular, no one has any real competition for this product. No matter, I bought three!
I do wish they were even smaller (I've got one location I'd like to mount one inside a wall box, which is admittedly pretty niche), and I am never again touching UI's configuration software (even 10 years later I feel that wound), but, yeah... love these little guys.
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.
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'.
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.
Not quite, DIY vs technologies like Unifi make it accessible to the masses where the former is for the few to feel good about themselves, and the latter makes a difference in moving things forward for the many without as much investment in time, because people shouldn't have to be free employees of technology to derive a benefit..
"Just works" means you can enjoy other parts of technology, like what you do with it, instead of just getting and keeping it working.
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.
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.
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.
Just wanted to drop another data point that Linksys is also trash now. So for consumer-targeted gear it seems the options are:
1. Eero - great performance, no web config (only mobile app), cloud dependent, half the features paywalled for monthly subscription (eyeroll)
2. Linksys - confirmed piles of crap, a 6E mesh kit I tried last year performed worse than my 2018 Eeros so why bother. Config is even more limiting than Eero, the web UI is a slow disaster that times out constantly, and the app is terrible and the features are badly designed.
3. Netgear - sucks as parent comment explains
4. TP-Link - reputation is that it's bad but I haven't tried
5. Asus - never tried
6. Google - no doubt they'll kill and brick these at some point
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
"It just works" with Teltonika and Glinet as well. In most of the openwrt based routers multi-wan is already enabled. It is also very easy to do with TP-Link Omada (just enable a checkbox).
So, implying that Unifi is the only company that does this in an easy way is misleading marketing.
Why would you guess Chinese? Broadcom, Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Realtek are the typical answers for radio chips, no? None of whom are Chinese? There certainly are Chinese radio chips, such as from Espressif or Huawei, but they aren't especially popular in APs or anything
The majority of their foundries are in Taiwan and South Korea which, to avoid politics, is outside what most people mean when they worry about tech made in China (they think about the PRC).
You can buy PoE splitters that will take ethernet in and give you ethernet + some power supply out. Looks like you need 12V/2A and a cursory search throws up a few options.
The big question is why do we need 5g? My phone doesn’t support it and my internet is fast enough as long as I have good coverage. Coverage problems are only exaggerated by 5G since the range for short waves is shorter
5G does not mean shorter waves/higher frequencies, that's just a common deployment. In Sweden we have 5G on the 700 MHz band, 5900 MHz, and several others in between.
Back in school, I had a teacher who was in charge of installing 3G, 4G, and 5G antennas for a carrier in France. The answer is that the 4G frequency bands are saturated, and they pushed 5G mainly to relieve congestion on the 4G network. Theoretically, 5G has just as much range (maybe even a little bit more with beamforming) on the 700 MHz and 800 MHz bands.
I’ve worked at companies with cellular failover for the most critical services.
5G in my city is 650 Mbps and is honestly cheaper than fiber, but my fiber has better jitter (and can go up to 2 Gbps). For a lot of people, 5G would be more cost effective.
FAQ: "Can the UniFi 5G Max Outdoor work as a standalone device?"
-> No. The UniFi 5G Max Outdoor must be adopted by a UniFi Cloud Gateway or UniFi Gateway and cannot function independently as a router or modem.
Why do you need the entire integrated setup to be outdoor-rated? That just adds tons of cost. If the antennas and modem need to be outside for signal strength reasons, so be it, but as much of your networking gear as possible should be indoors.
There are brands specifically for those markets though. Complaining about Ubiquiti not making a product for that specific use case feels like complaining about a Honda Civic not being an offroad-capable Jeep.
“The UniFi 5G Max lineup was created with a clear goal in mind: deliver a sleek, versatile, and exceptionally powerful 5G internet experience that works effortlessly in any environment.”
If it’s fine if you want to build a golf cart, just don’t pretend it’s an ATV.
The problem I have seen is when I need it most, due to a rare fiber internet outage, so does everyone else nearby and cellular data becomes saturated and unusable.
In locations where fiber is not available (like my place), cable is the next best option, and cable has a lot more unexpected downtime. I could see this being a good backup, especially for small businesses like retail shops that couldn't afford to have their POS go down for half a day.
Agreed retail is a good customer for this tech. But even after getting fiber personally, it gets cut a lot by landscaping crews. Most of the time it’s a residential line that takes a day to fix. But a few times it’s been a main line and it takes 3-4 days. Maybe I’m unusual but that’s been my experience
Around here, it’s Starlink >> Fiber >> Cable because our lines are above ground and outages are frequent.
Fiber is less expensive than and more than 10x faster than starlink, in fairness.
Our 5g towers seem to run off the fiber lines, so it’s not really a backup (and gets overwhelmed anyway).
I’m considering getting fiber in addition to starlink, but I wish they’d just buried the lines.
I see telephone trucks repairing downed lines we’d rely on many dozens of times a year. Digging a trench would probably pay for itself in a year or two.
> Digging a trench would probably pay for itself in a year or two.
I know some people running independent community fiber ISPs. Digging trenches can be a nightmare depending on the neighbourhood. You can have property ownership issues, other utilities being present, permit nightmares, different ground/soil types, etc. That ignores the fact that when somebody else digs they can hit your lines and repairing that is a pain.
Digging is better, though. But it’s not necessarily as easy as one may think.
Where I work just acquired new property and are deploying a new site. It took 9 months, from date of first contact, before the ISP could come out, bore under the road, and run fiber to our building from two poles away. And that's just a short ~500 feet underground run.
I couldn't imagine the amount of permitting and logistics involved in trying to bury an entire run across town.
My community did the big dig around 2001. They finished around 2010. It was a huge project that took hundreds if not thousands of man-hours. I'm not sure if anyone ever actually calculated the total cost. And this is for a pretty small town. Now the day-to-day connectivity is much better, and weather almost never knocks us out, but when something does get knocked out, it takes longer to fix.
Overall, it's much nicer. No ugly telephone poles, don't have to worry about weather, just reliable, strong service. But to think it pays for itself in 2 years is laughable.
Those do exist, they’re called cell signal boosters. Once upon a time, I believe, some American cell providers would give you one for free if you had bad signal at home, which mattered a lot more before phones all had wifi calling.
> Those do exist, they’re called cell signal boosters.
No, those are different. They are describing a femtocell. I still have one site with a T-Mobile one. It basically VPN’s to T-Mobile’s network core through the cable ISP, uses GPS to check its location for licensed spectrum, and then broadcasts its own LTE signal. It does not boost/repeat the signal of a nearby tower, it runs its own.
Do they work for 5G? I think just amplifying the signal (like 2g signal boosters did) would mess with a lot with all the fancy RF tricks that make 5G fast, stable, low-latency and quite low on package loss (5G has impressively low package loss on the IP layer).
For most use cases WiFi should be the better solution. VoWiFi works well for calls. Should be enough for home and office use.
That shouldn't be the case. There's an extension to VoWiFi to support SMS over IP. With 2G and 3G going away it's not like your carrier has a choice anyway.
I think in the US there are even public 5G frequencies that can be used. In most of Europe you would need to buy an expensive license to do that.
Private 5G networks usually need internal eSIM cards, you can't just let public devices roam into the private 5G net.
Benefits of 5G over WiFi: much better roaming between APs, higher distances, and better congestion management if there are hundreds of devices connected to a cell.
Why are people paying what seems obscene prices for UniFi stuff? You probably all have spare hardware lying around that can be repurposed as a router; it does not need to be modern. I use a Ryzen 5 as a general purpose home server/router/firewall running Linux and no ISP plastic box or expensive "prosumer" gear can't touch its performance. I can push 25Gbps through it (saturating my SFP28 LAN), or north of 4Gbps through Wireguard. For access points in a home setting, TP-Link boxes flashed with OpenWrt are also considerably better value and far more "free" (i.e., unclouded) than any UniFi stuff constantly phoning home for "updates."
I know I pay more for my unifi gear. I want stuff that works without having to hack around with it. I do enough of that in my day job. Their ecosystem works without needing to tinker. I love it.
I'm a Hacker News reader and relate with the community. At the same time, it's not like I've same interest and energy in every niche. For example, I might have interest in custom building my keyboards, but may not be in restoring an old router. It's not like HN users exclusively use Linux desktops and many of us prefer simplicity.
The point I'm trying make is that there is more nuance than a simple HN user stereotype.
I really want to want Unifi, but my experience with one of their products (UDM + mesh) was that it was a ton of effort to get something working that ended up being slower and more fiddly than a consumer focused router. When I get home, I don’t want to be an unpaid sysadmin
While Unifi supports wireless backhaul/mesh, the entire system is heavily designed to encourage wired backhaul - all their wireless APs are PoE for a reason. If you are going to invest in the Unifi ecosystem, it makes sense to invest in decent networking - wireless "mesh" is always a compromise for running multiple wireless APs.
If you are in a situation you need multiple wireless APs but can't run ethernet to them (like renting etc), I'd probably pass on a Unifi system personally.
Yeah this lines up with my experience. Had issues with mesh (I bought an AP with mesh in the product name that covered a wall outlet, no Ethernet in)(edit: it was the “beacon”), essentially was told “you’re holding it wrong.”, and moved on. They seem like lovely products for their intended use case, but my personal experience was not great.
Edit 2: I have eero now. The nodes seem to have some proprietary protocol that sends clients to the best node as you walk around the house. I can’t setup Vlans or do power user stuff, but my WiFi actually “just works” now. I don’t think I’ve touched it once after initial setup.
The fallback support for UniFi setups will be awesome.
I’m honestly tempted to get it for my house. My ISP downtime is pretty low but it does happen every once in a while, at the most inopportune times, which impedes working from home.
Having a wireless backup would hopefully cover those downtimes
I have a wireless backup[1] using Vyos[2] and a 5G router provided for free by the 5G service provider for those rare moments when both fiber links are dead.
At the same time I would never recommend anyone get 5G internet as their primary service if you have other options and especially not from one of these cheap providers.
I just did the update to 2025-Q2 (I use the quarterly stream build).
Initially I thought this is going to be a huge pain. I have many interfaces and also pass-through hardware like the SFP28 card. I made a copy of my primary router vm and added fake interfaces with the same MAC addresses. I then went through the update procedure which was very simple.
in vyos vm:
wget https://community-downloads.vyos.dev/stream/1.5-stream-2025-Q2/vyos-1.5-stream-2025-Q2-generic-amd64.iso -o vyos-1.5-stream-2025-Q2.iso
add system image /mnt/iso/vyos-1.5-stream-2025-Q2.iso
# follow prompts
reboot
# boot screen will offer two version now, old and new
That was it and it worked. So from now on I know I can just take a snapshot of my vm and do it directly on the main vm without making a copy.
You do loose any custom configs you may have. In my case it was fstab changes and my cron entries.
> Interesting fact that EdgeOS from Unifi was a fork
That's how I got started with it, my first "proper" router was an ER-X. It's sad they abandoned the Edge product line to move everything to the UI first Unifi one that still doesn't have all the features (specifically, conditional routing for address groups/ipsets).
Indeed. It's very cheap ($5?) and is fast enough to do 1080p YouTube with unlimited data. It's speed capped so if you really need it it's best to upgrade the plan that month.
I am cautiously optimistic that this means even if thousands of these devices suddenly "light up" in an outage, the infrastructure should be able to handle them, right? Thoughts?
I for one think this is a great marketing opportunity. Even if you have the best gigabit fiber, at five dollars a month, this is a no brainer for a lot of people. If you can have monthly recurring revenue for starlink doing essentially nothing, why not? Also, it is probably easier to upsell to existing customers.
There are now quite a few options for wifi APs with cellular backup. I use TP-Link, and it's ok for the price, I guess, and supports adding OneMesh range extenders.
The problem with this setup for me is that it doesn't work with uplink that sometimes becomes unstable yet nominally working, and in general LTE fallback triggers slowly.
Are there any prosumer-friendly options for connection bundling, which can balance uplinks continuously?
Forgive me, I didn’t watch the videos: is that what the Dream Router supports - normal wired WAN uplink, plus 5G failover? If so, yes, that’s very attractive.
I have a T-Mobile backup home internet plan, and when I had a rack set up, it was my failover from fiber. The Dream Machine Pro did auto failover and failback flawlessly. However, I recently moved, and am redoing my homelab so I have no rack right now; internet is from a Dream Router, so I don’t have auto-failover. I doubt I’d buy this for the small window of time I expect to be in this situation, but if you didn’t have or want a rack, an AIO with failover would be great.
Yep, that's one of the main reasons people are excited for this. Instead of a dedicated ISP modem with 5G, you can just use this, plug it into a gateway WAN port set up as the secondary failover connection, and you'll have a backup if you get knocked offline.
The 5G unit itself also has its own failover with support for two 5G SIMs.
"All are equipped with dual SIM slots, with one SIM replaceable by eSIM, and are fully unlocked: any major carrier, any type of deployment, with one piece of hardware."
We had a 5 day power outage (Bellevue WA, not exactly in the middle of nowhere) and after 2 days both the cable internet and cell towers went down, so even 5G would not have helped. I had backup power but no internet. On the way back from Best Buy with my new starlink, everything came back online of course. But now I’m ready for the next multi day outage.
I have a network cable from my secondary WAN port on my dream machine running to my first story roof where there’s a wall mount ready for starlink to be plopped in.
> after 2 days both the cable internet and cell towers went down, so even 5G would not have helped.
I discovered the same thing the hard way myself recently (in Norway); turns out that cell towers only has enough battery for ~24-36 hours (if you're lucky).
However, someone messing with the fibre to my house is a bigger possibility than power outage, so I'll probably end up with this 5G product. :)
Yeah, the fact you can use any of the ports on a dream machine as a WAN (its not optimal, but is an option) makes it really easy to have a couple of fallbacks if you really need high redundancy.
Yeah they're not really putting out new exciting technologies. But this is cheaper than every other equivalent solution on the market for sale today in the USA.
How does the Teltonika work out for you - I nearly bought it earlier this year but it doesn't have support for external antennae. I'm just on the edge of 5G coverage and I'm not sure I want to splash out on something which I can't tune for decent reception.
Seems an odd omission for a ruggedised outside modem - the Unifi also seems to not support external antennae.
(I'd also prefer a unifi version just so it fits in the with rest of the networking infra I have in the mökki.)
OTD500 is antenna + router in a single box. There is nothing else needed. I just put it outdoors with a POE cable. Originally, I used it as a backup, but now I have an unlimited SIM, so I use it as a second internet connection.
Seems weird to cripple the product by not allowing me to (optionally) disable the internal antenna and instead use and tune an external antenna. And I suspect that is likely to make a difference when you are on the edge of coverage, but you know exactly where the relevant cell tower is, a few km away.
oh, I didn't noticed that at first, but you are right.
What I did noticed is so many fast videos right next to text. I didn't even bother to read it (without firefox read mode) because it makes me a bit dizzy.
Even if my vision is okay, it still feels like a slap to the face. Can't take some time to make sure the most important part of the page is readable by all.
I specifically have issues with strong back lighting (genetic cataracts suck - I’m only in my 40s) so bright white page and light writing is super frustrating. Dark mode is my best friend.
My good friend is a network engineer and provider in NYC for decades now, pretty good one at that. Has anyone deployed UniFi in a computer centric professional environment? Just to be more specific a bit, computer centric professional environment means networks and computers are the primary way of getting job done. He hasn't seen any UniFi but his home is all UniFi.
Small businesses? Sure. I've seen Unifi networks with a few hundred MACs often enough.
Enterprises? Thousands, tens of thousands of employees? Generally cost isn't prohibitive at the scale so bigger ecosystems with more support make way more sense. Even their enterprise switches aren't really equivalent to Cisco, Arista, Juniper, etc enterprise offerings. They're inching forward, though.
What kinda of small businesses? My friend does consulting and most of his business is on small (100-250 employees) size and sometimes small start up, typically in the office construction phase where he comes in and set up network infrastructure. He never seems anyone asking for UniFi, but again, might just because the cost? He feels UniFi is price competitive at that scale but no one wants it for some reason.
When he was with a larger company, cisco and juniper were the only options.
Upmarket electrical trade, engineering offices, MSPs commonly, smallish healthcare, an equine event center, a bank.
I see tons of small businesses (mom & pop, restaurants) with a UI AP or two, of course, but that's not what you meant, I don't think.
The places that COULD use UI often just don't care, and want the cheap toilet paper (netgear, ebay whatever) since cost discipline can be critical. I think there's a niche of biz with enough margin that networking/cameras get sold together and they don't insist on lowest price. My guess would also be the MSP that is quoting the job also heavily influences whether UI is used, plenty of dinosaurs out there.
Bigger places want routing, network virtualization, etc from the big players you mentioned. UI doesn't want to mess with BGP, spine-leaf, sd access/wan, etc. There's also like the 24/7 support options they want, and access to the partner/VAR/contractor networks so you have tons of options. The sales deals and dinners unfortunately factor into this too...
Thank you! He recently did a job on a newly constructed venue hall for about 300-400 people. He originally quoted full UI which has everything the company is looking for, from network to security camera. The company didn't want that, I think he ended do a combination of Cisco and some odd security system.
Would be useful for 5G home internet if they had IMEI spoofing but I would doubt it. It sucks how the gateway from these services do not have external antenna support.
OT: Does anyone know of a setting or extension for Firefox to stop those autoplaying videos? I have gifs disabled, prefers-reduced-motion on, and those videos in that article both autoplay, and start again after pausing them manually. I have no idea what the article is about (except what the title says) because I kept getting distracted by the annoying videos.
The 5G max outdoor looks very good and seems to be a direct competitor to the pretty good Mikrotik LHG series. I wonder about the antenna gain, though, the Mikrotik certainly looks more impressive.
(I've been using Mikrotik LHG LTE6 kit devices for years now)
Antenna gain isn't everything: I've set up the LTE6 for people, and in some cases I was able to get more speed in the same location with the latest iPhone.
In locations where you're at the edge of coverage, and your phone is not getting anything at all, it's great.
I sometimes suspected that the modem in these LTE / 5G routers is less well tuned and tested with various network than what you have e.g. in an iPhone.
The Mikrotik LTE6 device is a Cat.6 LTE device, so up to 300/50Mbits, and since some time ago, all iPhones are Cat.20 and 5G and all that stuff.
But that's not the only important thing. The frequency band support for the modem is very important. Not all networks nor even cell phone antennas work on the same frequencies, so even when connecting to antennas of the same company, depending on the antenna you connect, it'll have different bands enabled depending on the hardware or the connectivity they have there.
You have to check the specs for you modem [0][1] and see what bands are supported, what bands are supported in the antenna your connecting to [2]... Depending on the category of your device [3], and the channels that are allowed to be used at the same time, the congestion, the interference, and... it can happen than a consumer phone downloads faster than a dedicated industrial modem, if the available frequencies aren't the most favorable.
That device is bafflingly LTE cat20 with 2Gbps downlink, and then has LAN connectivity only through a single 1Gbps ethernet port.
Actually, it seems one of the advantages of the new Ubiquiti devices over Teltonika/Mikrotik/Gl.iNet is that they actually have 10 Gbps SFP+ and 2.5 Gbps ethernet ports.
I’ve got their unifi mobile router 4g and am quite happy with it in conjunction with one of their routers which got two lan ports you can either run in primary/primary mode where it does load balancing or primary/secondary one where the latter only gets used when the main one has issues.
I just kinda wish multipath TCP or something similar would be more in use so you wouldn’t notice a swap in connection mid air.
I'm glad it has a physical SIM still. I always use regular prepaid phone plans for my 4/5G backup but the providers don't like these being used with modems. So they have more options to block them with eSIM.
The fact that the outdoor version is directional kind of limits its adoption in mobile usage, doesn't it? Most similar products have omnidirectional antenna. Can't imagine you would rotate it by hand on a boat towards the land while on passage
Not GP but I’m trying to figure out what you’re insinuating.
> For tougher environments or deployments with poor indoor cellular coverage, the outdoor model maintains the same high performance cellular connectivity with improved antenna performance in a durable IP67 rated enclosure. It is built for rooftop installs, off site locations, and mobile deployments where reliability is critical. Just like its indoor counterpart, you can also connect it via any PoE port, anywhere on your network, greatly simplifying cabling requirements.
And the first image they show of the outdoor model is it installed in a fixed location on a rooftop.
Your quote lists mobile deployments, their bullet point also says:
>Built for rooftops, remote sites, and vehicle based setups
They are insinuating if you actually read their press release then you would not state it was targeted only at stationary deployments.
Based on the spec sheet 2 out of its 6 antennas are directional, this is probably a 4x4 modem so it must have some way to switch 2 antenna from directional to omni.
I think it’s going to be targeting mostly stationary HA redundant uplinks. Backup for primary uplink or low usage primary link. In those scenarios pointing at your nearest antenna fixed is much better than an omnidirectional antenna.
The spec sheet mentions 6 antennas and implies only 2 are directional:
(6) Embedded cellular antennas, including
(2) high-gain for downlink: peak 9 dBi, 85°x85°
Typically these modems are 4x4 mimo so it must have some method for switching the 2 directional with 2 of the omnis in it based on which ones is needed.
These things are nice when they work but when they don't you're completely in the dark. Even figuring out how much GB is left on your simcard is a nightmare.
I wonder if this works any better than their Unifi LTE Backup. That was so bad I gave up on it after about a month. The biggest problem was the weird way the router handled routes meant that with the LTE on the network, even when it wasn't being used a bunch of router features were impaired. Like static routes.
Ubiquiti makes some good hardware but their software is full of terrible bugs.
I think Verizon is an eSIM option on the modem; dunno about the Router version, but I’d want to assume it’s the same?
Either way, having modems that are fully unlocked for Stateside usage for once is a nice touch. Their LTE line was essentially AT&T-locked, or unlocked but only supporting AT&T in the US, so this is a nice improvement.
I live near 5G relay and I was surprised that I could get symmetrical 1gbps connection, without any cables. Still remembering 56k modem, it feels like magic.
Can anybody explain to me why these supposedly premier networking devices are lacking so much in bandwidth? I get it that mmWave is really only ever realistically going to hit 2.5G over the air, but is there any reason why they're not willing to provide at least 10G copper, or an actual SFP port? Hell, even Macs support 10G these days. I never understood this. Do they mean 2 Gbps downlink per client, or per device in total? If it's the former, 2.5G wired seems like a major bottleneck to any serious consumption.
If a single client at 2 Gbps is all the promise of 5G amounted to, well, it would be disappointing to say the least.
Probably because of the PoE. That discards SFP+, and makes difficult PoE over copper, as you'd probably need 802.3bt PoE++ (that probably most of the Unifi devices aren't compatible with), or a very short cable to avoid interference.
10Gb interfaces also tend to run quite hot and be a bit power hungry.
This is a device that needs to be in a location with good 5G reception, so it makes sense to be PoE powered so you can put it near a window or in the location that gets the best reception, and only run a long ethernet cable. And, although I don't like it too much, 2.5G or 5G NBASE-T is the nearest thing that covers 5G speeds.
The 2Gb downlink speed is the 5G downlink, the max for the whole 5G connection, so 2.5Gb ethernet is enough for that.
This is a modem, it itself is the client of a cell tower/base station. So unless you put it in a faraday cage with the base station next to it, 2G is almost certainly enough.
The better reason to put a 10G transceiver in this would be that some (cheap, honestly garbage) SFP+ transceivers can’t negotiate anything between 1G and 10G. But I’ve only seen that on bargain-bin hardware so I don’t know that they should be designing products around it.
They said the same thing about 40G but hey, I've loved it for bridging the gap between my two (10G and 100G, respectively) Mikrotik switches. You can have a dozen Gigabit ports, as well as up to four true 10G devices on your aggregation switch, and neither would be bottlenecked by traffic to and from the backside. This has been a massive boon. However, when it comes to 2.5G, I struggle to find one good reason to use it; such a tiny step-up in bandwidth, and for what?
> However, when it comes to 2.5G, I struggle to find one good reason to use it; such a tiny step-up in bandwidth, and for what?
Portability and heat. You can get a small USB 2.5G adapter that produces negligible heat, but a Thunderbolt 10G adapter is large and produces a substantial amount of heat.
I use 10G at home, but the adapter I throw into my laptop bag is a tiny 2.5G adapter.
I’m sure it depends on the model, but in my experience if you force a 10G copper transceiver to 2.5G the insane heat generation goes away. I don’t have any Thunderbolt 10G adapters, but I’m kind of surprised they’re much larger. A SFP+ transceiver is the same size as a SFP one.
I think a major reason for the size is for heat dissipation, because it has to be prepared to handle the heat of a full 10G copper connection. Mine runs hot.
Most of my cables coming out of the aggregation switch are DAC and fiber, but there is no 10G copper because my PC came with 10G copper NIC integrated. Anyway, the difference in heat between this transceiver is shockingly large.
I knew it runs hot before I deployed it, but I wasn't aware that you have to wait for it to cooldown before unplugging, or you get burnt.
3.0 PCIE is irrelevant today when it comes to devices you want on 10G. I'm pretty sure the real reason is that 2.5G can comfortably run on cable you used for 1G[1], while 10G get silly hot or requires transceiver and user understanding of a hundred 2-3 letter acronyms.
Combine it with IPS speeds lagging behind. 2.5G while feels odd to some, makes total sense on consumer market.
[1]: at short distances, I had replaced one run with shielded cable to get 2.5G, but it had POE, so it might contribute to noise?)
PCIe is full duplex. And there's no requirement for ethernet ports to be able to do full tilt. Even with a 1x PCIe 3.0, a 10G port will be much much better than a 2.5G one.
(But PCIe 3.0 of course is from 2010 and isn't too relevant today - 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 and 7.0 have 16/32/64/128 Gbps per lane respectively)
Are motherboards commonly using PCIe 3.0 for onboard peripherals these days? I wouldn’t expect it to save them much money, but my PCIe knowledge is constrained to the application layer - I know next to nothing about the PHY or associated costs.
40G on Mikrotik is just channel bonding of 4 10G links at layer 2. It’s not like the vast majority of 100G that does layer 1 bonding. I really don’t know why they did it other than to have a bigger number on the spec sheet - I can’t imagine they save any money having a weird MAC setup almost nobody else uses on a few low-volume models.
Is OpenWRT on Unifi APs any good? I hadn’t heard of it before, and I couldn’t find any performance comparisons on a quick search. Ubiquiti has gone downhill on a lot of things the last 5 years or so, but their radio firmware has always been a step up (within their price range) for me. I wouldn’t mind ditching the Unifi controller software though.
I'm using an U6+ with OpenWRT on it, flashed straight after unboxing and it's the only thing serving wireless in my household
It's alright except for some shenanigans with DHCP trying to compete with the router, I fixed that by just disabling DHCP on the AP if I recall correctly.
Speeds are pretty much as advertised on the box, the main thing using wireless is the TV as it has a 100mbit LAN port and it it's always smooth sailing. VLAN-separated SSIDs work great as well.
The controller is annoying and changes completely every 6 months, and for home I use basically none of its features beyond configuring the AP. Virtualy all the issues I’ve had with Unifi APs were controller bugs, telling the AP firmware to do stupid things when it could have done literally nothing.
That said, I have some concerns that the OpenWRT AP firmware is not as optimized as the Unifi firmware is for that specific hardware. Mostly for wireless performance, but I also don’t want to hit some weird CPU bottleneck.
Just bought a Gl.iNet Puli. It's only 4G but seems like a better option if you want to supply internet to some devices that you move around. Planning to use it for setup and management of a headless presentation PC as it can directly be connected to the LAN port.
I have a mobile 4g router from them and it supports physical esim. I even managed to get their suggested card for cheap. They have some support in their firmware to set it up, so you can do that fully on the router.
I have read that people managed to get an eSIM installed on it, but I think there are also physical eSIM options. See https://www.gl-inet.com/solutions/esim/
I gotta say, I hate it when companies use “xxx bits per second”, whether its Mega or Giga nobody uses bits per second and for the average consumer it’s very unclear that this differs from bytes.
Having to explain to relatives and such that “yeah you actually have to divide that by 8” is a hassle and I get tricked by it subconsciously at times as well.
2 gbps meaning 250 megabytes per second is a SCAM. A marketing sham at it’s finest.
“I have 100 mbps download” meaning “I get 12.5 megabytes download per second” is ridiculous!!
Networking only uses bits/s. Nobody in the networking world talks in bytes/s, and pretty much nobody in the data transfer world does.
The only industry that talks in bytes/s is parts of the storage space, because they relate to files, that are measured in bytes/s. And even them use both: the data link is in bits/s (e.g. SATA 6 is 6Gbps, NVMe uses the same bits/s than PCIe (1)) while the drive is usually in bytes/s (µSD cards, NVMe SSDs, etc).
When you look at the industry at large, throughput is virtually always measured in bits/s. HDMI is in bits/s. Video codecs measures bitrates in bits/s. Audio codecs measures bitrates in bits/s. PCIe is in bits/s (1). Ethernet is measured in bits/s. Wifi is measured in bits/s. You get the picture.
The good thing about keeping it consistent is that values are relatable. Streaming services naturally talk in bitrate for the video quality, and your ISP also talks in bits/s. You can compare the two numbers. Bytes/s is only really useful for on the spot jobs that you do once, like transferring photos from an SD card to your computer. Otherwise, it's just a unit.
(1): ackhstually pcie measures speeds in transfers/s because they include the 8b10b/64b66b encoding overhead and TLP overhead but I digress.
That’s not marketing related at all. It’s how network speeds have been measured long before ISPs were a business.
A byte per second is no more intuitive than a nibble per second or a bit per second. You might be used to byte as a power user because of storage, but I assure you that to regular people “256 gigabytes” is a meaningless number as well.
I honestly feel mibi and gibibytes per second are the easiest units to rationalise about. The data I am transferring is already known to me in its binary prefix unit. Seconds for that data to transfer is a trivial translation.
This ship sailed out of view a long time ago, the only GB you’ll see that is still base-2 is RAM. And that’s only because you literally can’t address physical RAM in non power-of-2 blocks in most architectures.
I am confused, this is just a 5G router right? Like the 5 year old Huawei CPE Pro 2 but with wifi7, poe and eSim?
[1] https://consumer.huawei.com/en/routers/5g-cpe-pro-2/
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.
This seems like a stretch. If your position is that the REAL experts are using Cisco gear instead, I guess fine. But the "HN Crowd" loves using Ubiquiti at home because it is light years better than any consumer brand, (1) in terms of giving people who know what they're doing sufficient control to do so, (2) in terms of performance, and (3) in terms of not being a buggy piece of crap.
Contrast with:
(1) eero has no web UI (ONLY mobile phone!) and almost zero network configurability. You can't set a hostname for instance for DHCP. You can have exactly one main and one guest network. You don't get to configure anything about it though. Etc.
(3) I bought a Linksys replacement for my Eeros to get 6E -- I returned it to the store due to how horrifyingly bad the Web UI was and how bad the "app" was too. AND it also had flaws like inability to have reservation IPs outside the DHCP pool range.
Apple is actually the opposite of Ubiquiti -- they don't want you to be able to configure anything or have any visibility into anything. It either 'just works' or just silently fails or fails with "An error occurred."
The eero also has a privacy policy that allows them to record your DNS traffic (they are owned by Amazon).
https://www.historytools.org/docs/reasons-to-avoid-amazon-ee...
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.
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.
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.
>7 years of software maintenance is absolutely precedented and expected of any serious networking vendor.
He specifically specified that he was happy with ubiquiti since it was consumer grade hardware
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.
Usually, I use Mikrotik wAP ACs for this kind of thing. They're cheap-enough to buy brand new, and they're designed to be able to work outdoors in the weather.
But I might pick up an R720 just to play with -- that's a different echelon of gear.
Thanks for the tip.
Not that everyone needs it, but it doesn't seem like Mikrotik has any 6E or 7 WAPs? If they do, I'd love to try one
For outdoor, the model numbers start with "T". I think the T710 is the equivalent of the R720 for outdoor.
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?
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.
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 ;-)
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.
On the Sonos tangent: the hardware is really good! But the software is just staggeringly, aggressively, and proactively terrible. :(
Can it be reflashed
there's sadly no community solution AFAICT
Why cant an android phone with ethernet tethering to a router suffice?
I've done this using an android phone, usb-c hub w/ethernet nic, and and edgerouter lite before.
The biggest missing piece i see is the option for an external antenna.
I don't understand how that fixes the awful Sonos software.
The antenna is often more important than the receiver
Hear hear!
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.
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.
I have developed a deep dislike for UI overall through the years due to their many missteps (see: most of this thread), but those little PoE-powered 2.5G switches are amazing and I am surprised that while 2.5G is getting more and more popular, no one has any real competition for this product. No matter, I bought three!
I do wish they were even smaller (I've got one location I'd like to mount one inside a wall box, which is admittedly pretty niche), and I am never again touching UI's configuration software (even 10 years later I feel that wound), but, yeah... love these little guys.
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.
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.
Interesting, how about that. I did definitely note that they were considerably more weighty in the hand than the AC-era APs they were replacing.
> Unifi is the Apple of networking gear
They were founded by some people that left Apple.
Not quite, DIY vs technologies like Unifi make it accessible to the masses where the former is for the few to feel good about themselves, and the latter makes a difference in moving things forward for the many without as much investment in time, because people shouldn't have to be free employees of technology to derive a benefit..
"Just works" means you can enjoy other parts of technology, like what you do with it, instead of just getting and keeping it working.
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.
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.
Just wanted to drop another data point that Linksys is also trash now. So for consumer-targeted gear it seems the options are:
1. Eero - great performance, no web config (only mobile app), cloud dependent, half the features paywalled for monthly subscription (eyeroll)
2. Linksys - confirmed piles of crap, a 6E mesh kit I tried last year performed worse than my 2018 Eeros so why bother. Config is even more limiting than Eero, the web UI is a slow disaster that times out constantly, and the app is terrible and the features are badly designed.
3. Netgear - sucks as parent comment explains
4. TP-Link - reputation is that it's bad but I haven't tried
5. Asus - never tried
6. Google - no doubt they'll kill and brick these at some point
Any others I'm forgetting?
Small aside, AVM have now formally rebranded as "FRITZ!"
Apple of networking? I suppose no OpenWrt then.
You actually can install Openwrt on bunch of their hardware
Out of the box, my Unifi Security Gateway runs Debian, as did my previous Unifi AC access points.
I just checked and my new Wifi 7 APs don't run Debian though, they...
Or OpenBSD, in my case a USG-3P. I would have otherwise tossed it but now it's a nice OpenBSD switch.
Only complaint I have with Unifi is so-so IPv6 support. I'd love to see a NAT64/DNS64 option configurable in their UI.the founder himself was an Apple hardware designer
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
What it can do, and Ubiquity already had this as a separate product, is act as a fallback for you regular internet connection.
You can do the same with Mikrotik and a ton of configuration, the pitch with Unify is that it "just works".
"It just works" with Teltonika and Glinet as well. In most of the openwrt based routers multi-wan is already enabled. It is also very easy to do with TP-Link Omada (just enable a checkbox).
So, implying that Unifi is the only company that does this in an easy way is misleading marketing.
Comparing against Mikrotik is a very low bar.
You're refuting a point he didn't make.
Sure, but it’s not manufactured in Ch- ah, nevermind.
This is perfect for me, who want to avoid Chinese-branded devices as much as possible.
Right, but do you know what radio chips they are using inside?
I would guess they are chinese...
Why would you guess Chinese? Broadcom, Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Realtek are the typical answers for radio chips, no? None of whom are Chinese? There certainly are Chinese radio chips, such as from Espressif or Huawei, but they aren't especially popular in APs or anything
Most of those chips are made in TSMC or samsung foundries, the majority of which are currently in China or South Asia.
The majority of their foundries are in Taiwan and South Korea which, to avoid politics, is outside what most people mean when they worry about tech made in China (they think about the PRC).
Realtek windows drivers literally have taiwnese written text. They are as American as Lego
I really dont see what your comment means in response to the current thread?
None of them are in china. They are in Taiwan and South Korea.
To be strictly accurate TSMC has exactly 2 fabs in China (Fab 10 & Fab 16). So it's not "none" in China, but very almost none.
Looks like Qualcomm X62
If you avoid Chinese-branded devices you should doubly avoid US-branded devices. See National Security Letters and Room 641A as a small subset of why.
It's a modem, not a router.
There are both, the router is further down the page
I have this exact Huawei as my failover internet connection, works perfectly except doesn't do PoE so I need to have a stupid wall-wart for it.
You can buy PoE splitters that will take ethernet in and give you ethernet + some power supply out. Looks like you need 12V/2A and a cursory search throws up a few options.
Yea, I have my Philips Hue hub powered via Poe and an adapter along with a few other devices that use straight up USB-C or micro-USB
I need to figure out if the 5G box can be powered like that too
The big question is why do we need 5g? My phone doesn’t support it and my internet is fast enough as long as I have good coverage. Coverage problems are only exaggerated by 5G since the range for short waves is shorter
5G does not mean shorter waves/higher frequencies, that's just a common deployment. In Sweden we have 5G on the 700 MHz band, 5900 MHz, and several others in between.
Not everyone has cable/fibre/wifi in their homes, and need to resort to 4/5g cellular services in order to be online.
This product is aimed at those people who want something nicer than the 5g router bundled with their plan.
Back in school, I had a teacher who was in charge of installing 3G, 4G, and 5G antennas for a carrier in France. The answer is that the 4G frequency bands are saturated, and they pushed 5G mainly to relieve congestion on the 4G network. Theoretically, 5G has just as much range (maybe even a little bit more with beamforming) on the 700 MHz and 800 MHz bands.
5G has lower latency again than 4G. There's also more capacity making it possible to use it as a real connection than just backup.
See living near a concert venue. 4G behaves badly in a terrain of 100k phones
I’ve worked at companies with cellular failover for the most critical services.
5G in my city is 650 Mbps and is honestly cheaper than fiber, but my fiber has better jitter (and can go up to 2 Gbps). For a lot of people, 5G would be more cost effective.
Where I live, all the 4G is oversaturated and really slow.
It'd be a good option for failover Internet.
FAQ: "Can the UniFi 5G Max Outdoor work as a standalone device?" -> No. The UniFi 5G Max Outdoor must be adopted by a UniFi Cloud Gateway or UniFi Gateway and cannot function independently as a router or modem.
:(
They literally list the standalone version further down the page:
* Dream Router 5G Max: The Fully Integrated UniFi Experience *
but that one isn't outdoor rated.
Why do you need the entire integrated setup to be outdoor-rated? That just adds tons of cost. If the antennas and modem need to be outside for signal strength reasons, so be it, but as much of your networking gear as possible should be indoors.
Construction projects, festivals, etc. Bad cellular reception is more likely to be an issue far from other infrastructure.
I would think if you are doing projects that big, you would in fact want dedicated devices instead of all-in-ones.
It's LTE only, not 5G but this might be what you're looking for
https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/internet-solutions/colle...
There are plenty of outdoor plastic enclosures, mostly RF-transparent, that are intended to hold network equipment.
There are brands specifically for those markets though. Complaining about Ubiquiti not making a product for that specific use case feels like complaining about a Honda Civic not being an offroad-capable Jeep.
“The UniFi 5G Max lineup was created with a clear goal in mind: deliver a sleek, versatile, and exceptionally powerful 5G internet experience that works effortlessly in any environment.”
If it’s fine if you want to build a golf cart, just don’t pretend it’s an ATV.
Put it in a wooden box with a generator outside of it and you are good to go.
That’s got its own set of issues, but more importantly would you call that working effortlessly?
You can just download the software to configure/manage it. It’s not the best situation but you don’t have to buy anything.
The DreamRouter 5G Max is the stand alone device.
Yeah, exactly how I feel! This is disappointing. I remember, and miss the days when UniFi wasn't as user hostile as they have become.
The problem I have seen is when I need it most, due to a rare fiber internet outage, so does everyone else nearby and cellular data becomes saturated and unusable.
I keep an old Starlink in a closet for this exact reason
So I'm not the only guy doing this...
Does Starlink have a temporary or “pay as you go” option?
Not anymore. You need a $5/mo charge to keep your account hot.
They still give you 500kbps of speed, which is enough for checking emails, voice calls, navigation, music streaming, etc.
That's pretty reasonable.
Historically Starlink roam let you pause/suspend the service and restart it when you need-
In August they changed their plans so you’d need to cancel and re-subscribe.
In locations where fiber is not available (like my place), cable is the next best option, and cable has a lot more unexpected downtime. I could see this being a good backup, especially for small businesses like retail shops that couldn't afford to have their POS go down for half a day.
Agreed retail is a good customer for this tech. But even after getting fiber personally, it gets cut a lot by landscaping crews. Most of the time it’s a residential line that takes a day to fix. But a few times it’s been a main line and it takes 3-4 days. Maybe I’m unusual but that’s been my experience
Why are landscaping crews cutting wires on poles in the sky?
Poles are common, but so are existing buried conduits and vaults which are often used if they exist.
Around here, it’s Starlink >> Fiber >> Cable because our lines are above ground and outages are frequent.
Fiber is less expensive than and more than 10x faster than starlink, in fairness.
Our 5g towers seem to run off the fiber lines, so it’s not really a backup (and gets overwhelmed anyway).
I’m considering getting fiber in addition to starlink, but I wish they’d just buried the lines.
I see telephone trucks repairing downed lines we’d rely on many dozens of times a year. Digging a trench would probably pay for itself in a year or two.
> Digging a trench would probably pay for itself in a year or two.
I know some people running independent community fiber ISPs. Digging trenches can be a nightmare depending on the neighbourhood. You can have property ownership issues, other utilities being present, permit nightmares, different ground/soil types, etc. That ignores the fact that when somebody else digs they can hit your lines and repairing that is a pain.
Digging is better, though. But it’s not necessarily as easy as one may think.
Definitely a nightmare.
Where I work just acquired new property and are deploying a new site. It took 9 months, from date of first contact, before the ISP could come out, bore under the road, and run fiber to our building from two poles away. And that's just a short ~500 feet underground run.
I couldn't imagine the amount of permitting and logistics involved in trying to bury an entire run across town.
My community did the big dig around 2001. They finished around 2010. It was a huge project that took hundreds if not thousands of man-hours. I'm not sure if anyone ever actually calculated the total cost. And this is for a pretty small town. Now the day-to-day connectivity is much better, and weather almost never knocks us out, but when something does get knocked out, it takes longer to fix.
Overall, it's much nicer. No ugly telephone poles, don't have to worry about weather, just reliable, strong service. But to think it pays for itself in 2 years is laughable.
I would normally love this device, except I already have 2.5gbit fiber AND cable. They work for load balancing and failover.
Now I can't decide if I need a 3rd WAN.....
I was hoping this was a mini 5G cell tower that connected to the network, so you could have good 5G service inside.
Those do exist, they’re called cell signal boosters. Once upon a time, I believe, some American cell providers would give you one for free if you had bad signal at home, which mattered a lot more before phones all had wifi calling.
> Those do exist, they’re called cell signal boosters.
No, those are different. They are describing a femtocell. I still have one site with a T-Mobile one. It basically VPN’s to T-Mobile’s network core through the cable ISP, uses GPS to check its location for licensed spectrum, and then broadcasts its own LTE signal. It does not boost/repeat the signal of a nearby tower, it runs its own.
Do they work for 5G? I think just amplifying the signal (like 2g signal boosters did) would mess with a lot with all the fancy RF tricks that make 5G fast, stable, low-latency and quite low on package loss (5G has impressively low package loss on the IP layer).
For most use cases WiFi should be the better solution. VoWiFi works well for calls. Should be enough for home and office use.
FWIW, MMS and SMS are still left in the dust in this situation, as I have this exact issue.
That shouldn't be the case. There's an extension to VoWiFi to support SMS over IP. With 2G and 3G going away it's not like your carrier has a choice anyway.
I think in the US there are even public 5G frequencies that can be used. In most of Europe you would need to buy an expensive license to do that.
Private 5G networks usually need internal eSIM cards, you can't just let public devices roam into the private 5G net.
Benefits of 5G over WiFi: much better roaming between APs, higher distances, and better congestion management if there are hundreds of devices connected to a cell.
I need a portable mini 5G cell tower in a backpack form factor so that I can have 5G service indoors no matter where I am.
With what backhaul? WiFi?
Why are people paying what seems obscene prices for UniFi stuff? You probably all have spare hardware lying around that can be repurposed as a router; it does not need to be modern. I use a Ryzen 5 as a general purpose home server/router/firewall running Linux and no ISP plastic box or expensive "prosumer" gear can't touch its performance. I can push 25Gbps through it (saturating my SFP28 LAN), or north of 4Gbps through Wireguard. For access points in a home setting, TP-Link boxes flashed with OpenWrt are also considerably better value and far more "free" (i.e., unclouded) than any UniFi stuff constantly phoning home for "updates."
I know I pay more for my unifi gear. I want stuff that works without having to hack around with it. I do enough of that in my day job. Their ecosystem works without needing to tinker. I love it.
Perhaps you missed the product positioning: “Simple setup and clean design”
Not everyone wants to fix old hardware and configure linux on their weekends
> Not everyone wants to fix old hardware and configure linux on their weekends
I thought this was Hacker News.
I'm a Hacker News reader and relate with the community. At the same time, it's not like I've same interest and energy in every niche. For example, I might have interest in custom building my keyboards, but may not be in restoring an old router. It's not like HN users exclusively use Linux desktops and many of us prefer simplicity.
The point I'm trying make is that there is more nuance than a simple HN user stereotype.
UniFi customers =/= Hacker News.
I really want to want Unifi, but my experience with one of their products (UDM + mesh) was that it was a ton of effort to get something working that ended up being slower and more fiddly than a consumer focused router. When I get home, I don’t want to be an unpaid sysadmin
While Unifi supports wireless backhaul/mesh, the entire system is heavily designed to encourage wired backhaul - all their wireless APs are PoE for a reason. If you are going to invest in the Unifi ecosystem, it makes sense to invest in decent networking - wireless "mesh" is always a compromise for running multiple wireless APs.
If you are in a situation you need multiple wireless APs but can't run ethernet to them (like renting etc), I'd probably pass on a Unifi system personally.
Yeah this lines up with my experience. Had issues with mesh (I bought an AP with mesh in the product name that covered a wall outlet, no Ethernet in)(edit: it was the “beacon”), essentially was told “you’re holding it wrong.”, and moved on. They seem like lovely products for their intended use case, but my personal experience was not great.
Edit 2: I have eero now. The nodes seem to have some proprietary protocol that sends clients to the best node as you walk around the house. I can’t setup Vlans or do power user stuff, but my WiFi actually “just works” now. I don’t think I’ve touched it once after initial setup.
Check out Firewalla if your interest roots in tinkering :)
The fallback support for UniFi setups will be awesome.
I’m honestly tempted to get it for my house. My ISP downtime is pretty low but it does happen every once in a while, at the most inopportune times, which impedes working from home.
Having a wireless backup would hopefully cover those downtimes
I have a wireless backup[1] using Vyos[2] and a 5G router provided for free by the 5G service provider for those rare moments when both fiber links are dead.
At the same time I would never recommend anyone get 5G internet as their primary service if you have other options and especially not from one of these cheap providers.
[1] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/
[2] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/vyos-router-update/#wan-f...
Hey, another person running VyOS!
How are you handling updates? Do you update on a fixed cadence, or do you build your own LTS? Or do you just take a random nightly and stick to it?
I just did the update to 2025-Q2 (I use the quarterly stream build).
Initially I thought this is going to be a huge pain. I have many interfaces and also pass-through hardware like the SFP28 card. I made a copy of my primary router vm and added fake interfaces with the same MAC addresses. I then went through the update procedure which was very simple.
in vyos vm:
That was it and it worked. So from now on I know I can just take a snapshot of my vm and do it directly on the main vm without making a copy.You do loose any custom configs you may have. In my case it was fstab changes and my cron entries.
VyOS and it's parent Vyatta always have been neat. Shame it sold off and kinda got pay walled.
Interesting fact that EdgeOS from Unifi was a fork.
> Interesting fact that EdgeOS from Unifi was a fork
That's how I got started with it, my first "proper" router was an ER-X. It's sad they abandoned the Edge product line to move everything to the UI first Unifi one that still doesn't have all the features (specifically, conditional routing for address groups/ipsets).
Hundreds of us!
I adore VyOS
I used to do that. Now I use starlink as backup
Starlink has a specific backup plan too don't they?
Indeed. It's very cheap ($5?) and is fast enough to do 1080p YouTube with unlimited data. It's speed capped so if you really need it it's best to upgrade the plan that month.
Link? Cheapest I can find is $40/month
https://www.satelliteinternet.com/resources/starlink-standby...
Interesting option.
> 0.5Mbps (500Kbps)
I am cautiously optimistic that this means even if thousands of these devices suddenly "light up" in an outage, the infrastructure should be able to handle them, right? Thoughts?
You can’t use it perpetually they force you to upgrade after a while. It’s called „standby plan” for a reason.
I for one think this is a great marketing opportunity. Even if you have the best gigabit fiber, at five dollars a month, this is a no brainer for a lot of people. If you can have monthly recurring revenue for starlink doing essentially nothing, why not? Also, it is probably easier to upsell to existing customers.
There are now quite a few options for wifi APs with cellular backup. I use TP-Link, and it's ok for the price, I guess, and supports adding OneMesh range extenders.
The problem with this setup for me is that it doesn't work with uplink that sometimes becomes unstable yet nominally working, and in general LTE fallback triggers slowly.
Are there any prosumer-friendly options for connection bundling, which can balance uplinks continuously?
Assuming you're talking about running like a UI router and doing multi-WAN uplinks from it, you can.
They support load balancing (e.g. 95% WAN1, 5% WAN2) and SLA monitoring (ping/packet loss/jitter) with some voting options on what triggers a swap.
I think pfsense has similar options for WAN balancing if you don't like UI for routing.
Forgive me, I didn’t watch the videos: is that what the Dream Router supports - normal wired WAN uplink, plus 5G failover? If so, yes, that’s very attractive.
I have a T-Mobile backup home internet plan, and when I had a rack set up, it was my failover from fiber. The Dream Machine Pro did auto failover and failback flawlessly. However, I recently moved, and am redoing my homelab so I have no rack right now; internet is from a Dream Router, so I don’t have auto-failover. I doubt I’d buy this for the small window of time I expect to be in this situation, but if you didn’t have or want a rack, an AIO with failover would be great.
Yep, that's one of the main reasons people are excited for this. Instead of a dedicated ISP modem with 5G, you can just use this, plug it into a gateway WAN port set up as the secondary failover connection, and you'll have a backup if you get knocked offline.
https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052548713-WAN-Failo...
The 5G unit itself also has its own failover with support for two 5G SIMs.
"All are equipped with dual SIM slots, with one SIM replaceable by eSIM, and are fully unlocked: any major carrier, any type of deployment, with one piece of hardware."
You can also see the excitement in the subreddit where people are already in the Unifi ecosystem: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/comments/1pe5xh4/explore_p....
We had a 5 day power outage (Bellevue WA, not exactly in the middle of nowhere) and after 2 days both the cable internet and cell towers went down, so even 5G would not have helped. I had backup power but no internet. On the way back from Best Buy with my new starlink, everything came back online of course. But now I’m ready for the next multi day outage.
I have a network cable from my secondary WAN port on my dream machine running to my first story roof where there’s a wall mount ready for starlink to be plopped in.
I’ve made the second WAN a 10gb uplink.
I wish there were cheaper 10gb switch from Ubiquiti. The link Agg is good, but still pricey.
> after 2 days both the cable internet and cell towers went down, so even 5G would not have helped.
I discovered the same thing the hard way myself recently (in Norway); turns out that cell towers only has enough battery for ~24-36 hours (if you're lucky).
However, someone messing with the fibre to my house is a bigger possibility than power outage, so I'll probably end up with this 5G product. :)
Yeah, the fact you can use any of the ports on a dream machine as a WAN (its not optimal, but is an option) makes it really easy to have a couple of fallbacks if you really need high redundancy.
What I really want to know is how much they paid to acquire ui.com and whether that investment is paying off in any measurable kind of way.
I am already doing what is shown in the video with Teltonika OTD500, fully unlocked and with esim support as well.
Yeah they're not really putting out new exciting technologies. But this is cheaper than every other equivalent solution on the market for sale today in the USA.
How does the Teltonika work out for you - I nearly bought it earlier this year but it doesn't have support for external antennae. I'm just on the edge of 5G coverage and I'm not sure I want to splash out on something which I can't tune for decent reception.
Seems an odd omission for a ruggedised outside modem - the Unifi also seems to not support external antennae.
(I'd also prefer a unifi version just so it fits in the with rest of the networking infra I have in the mökki.)
OTD500 is antenna + router in a single box. There is nothing else needed. I just put it outdoors with a POE cable. Originally, I used it as a backup, but now I have an unlimited SIM, so I use it as a second internet connection.
If you mean the standard routers (like the Rutx50), Teltonika itself sells external enclosures with antennas. https://www.teltonika-networks.com/products/accessories/ante...
Yeah, I know - but an antenna embedded within a small box is going to be much less effective than a big old directional Yagi antenna like https://www.satshop.fi/en/4g/4g-5g/4g-antennas.html
Seems weird to cripple the product by not allowing me to (optionally) disable the internal antenna and instead use and tune an external antenna. And I suspect that is likely to make a difference when you are on the edge of coverage, but you know exactly where the relevant cell tower is, a few km away.
I wish website designers would remember that not everyone can see great. This text is so fine and light and they’ve also disabled screen reader
oh, I didn't noticed that at first, but you are right.
What I did noticed is so many fast videos right next to text. I didn't even bother to read it (without firefox read mode) because it makes me a bit dizzy.
Even if my vision is okay, it still feels like a slap to the face. Can't take some time to make sure the most important part of the page is readable by all.
I specifically have issues with strong back lighting (genetic cataracts suck - I’m only in my 40s) so bright white page and light writing is super frustrating. Dark mode is my best friend.
Have you tried Firefox Reader View? It allows you to set whatever text size and font is best for you.
Firefox reader view gives me better contrast. Also the text to speech mode works in reader view.
My good friend is a network engineer and provider in NYC for decades now, pretty good one at that. Has anyone deployed UniFi in a computer centric professional environment? Just to be more specific a bit, computer centric professional environment means networks and computers are the primary way of getting job done. He hasn't seen any UniFi but his home is all UniFi.
Small businesses? Sure. I've seen Unifi networks with a few hundred MACs often enough.
Enterprises? Thousands, tens of thousands of employees? Generally cost isn't prohibitive at the scale so bigger ecosystems with more support make way more sense. Even their enterprise switches aren't really equivalent to Cisco, Arista, Juniper, etc enterprise offerings. They're inching forward, though.
What kinda of small businesses? My friend does consulting and most of his business is on small (100-250 employees) size and sometimes small start up, typically in the office construction phase where he comes in and set up network infrastructure. He never seems anyone asking for UniFi, but again, might just because the cost? He feels UniFi is price competitive at that scale but no one wants it for some reason.
When he was with a larger company, cisco and juniper were the only options.
Upmarket electrical trade, engineering offices, MSPs commonly, smallish healthcare, an equine event center, a bank.
I see tons of small businesses (mom & pop, restaurants) with a UI AP or two, of course, but that's not what you meant, I don't think.
The places that COULD use UI often just don't care, and want the cheap toilet paper (netgear, ebay whatever) since cost discipline can be critical. I think there's a niche of biz with enough margin that networking/cameras get sold together and they don't insist on lowest price. My guess would also be the MSP that is quoting the job also heavily influences whether UI is used, plenty of dinosaurs out there.
Bigger places want routing, network virtualization, etc from the big players you mentioned. UI doesn't want to mess with BGP, spine-leaf, sd access/wan, etc. There's also like the 24/7 support options they want, and access to the partner/VAR/contractor networks so you have tons of options. The sales deals and dinners unfortunately factor into this too...
Thank you! He recently did a job on a newly constructed venue hall for about 300-400 people. He originally quoted full UI which has everything the company is looking for, from network to security camera. The company didn't want that, I think he ended do a combination of Cisco and some odd security system.
I've seen Cisco meraki AP's on the ceilings at more than a handful of tech companies, if that helps.
Thanks!
Would be useful for 5G home internet if they had IMEI spoofing but I would doubt it. It sucks how the gateway from these services do not have external antenna support.
Yeah; California’s network neutrality laws include a provision banning discrimination based on device type.
I’ve never heard of it being enforced, and blatant violations of it are the norm.
OT: Does anyone know of a setting or extension for Firefox to stop those autoplaying videos? I have gifs disabled, prefers-reduced-motion on, and those videos in that article both autoplay, and start again after pausing them manually. I have no idea what the article is about (except what the title says) because I kept getting distracted by the annoying videos.
Settings => Search for "Autoplay" => Click "Settings..." => For "Default for all websites" select "Block Audio and Video".
Thanks, I also noticed they allowlisted the FF about page...which is a bit cheeky.
Thank you, I could have sworn I had that active, but for some reason it was "audio only".
The about:config settings which you can look up:
I have mine set to 2 and 5 respectively.The 5G max outdoor looks very good and seems to be a direct competitor to the pretty good Mikrotik LHG series. I wonder about the antenna gain, though, the Mikrotik certainly looks more impressive.
(I've been using Mikrotik LHG LTE6 kit devices for years now)
Antenna gain isn't everything: I've set up the LTE6 for people, and in some cases I was able to get more speed in the same location with the latest iPhone.
In locations where you're at the edge of coverage, and your phone is not getting anything at all, it's great.
I sometimes suspected that the modem in these LTE / 5G routers is less well tuned and tested with various network than what you have e.g. in an iPhone.
Of course it's faster!
The Mikrotik LTE6 device is a Cat.6 LTE device, so up to 300/50Mbits, and since some time ago, all iPhones are Cat.20 and 5G and all that stuff.
But that's not the only important thing. The frequency band support for the modem is very important. Not all networks nor even cell phone antennas work on the same frequencies, so even when connecting to antennas of the same company, depending on the antenna you connect, it'll have different bands enabled depending on the hardware or the connectivity they have there.
You have to check the specs for you modem [0][1] and see what bands are supported, what bands are supported in the antenna your connecting to [2]... Depending on the category of your device [3], and the channels that are allowed to be used at the same time, the congestion, the interference, and... it can happen than a consumer phone downloads faster than a dedicated industrial modem, if the available frequencies aren't the most favorable.
--
This is my experience as well. Unless you actually need a directional antenna, an iPhone will be faster and more reliable than dedicated hardware.
> direct competitor to the pretty good Mikrotik LHG series
Is there a Mikrotik 5G version though? I am still waiting for that.
There is this now https://mikrotik.com/product/atl_5g_r16
That device is bafflingly LTE cat20 with 2Gbps downlink, and then has LAN connectivity only through a single 1Gbps ethernet port.
Actually, it seems one of the advantages of the new Ubiquiti devices over Teltonika/Mikrotik/Gl.iNet is that they actually have 10 Gbps SFP+ and 2.5 Gbps ethernet ports.
I’ve got their unifi mobile router 4g and am quite happy with it in conjunction with one of their routers which got two lan ports you can either run in primary/primary mode where it does load balancing or primary/secondary one where the latter only gets used when the main one has issues.
I just kinda wish multipath TCP or something similar would be more in use so you wouldn’t notice a swap in connection mid air.
I'm glad it has a physical SIM still. I always use regular prepaid phone plans for my 4/5G backup but the providers don't like these being used with modems. So they have more options to block them with eSIM.
I thought it would create a private 5G network to extend the unify WiFis. But it's just a fancy 5G modem, right?
2Gbps?! I was testing out tmobile 5G service with their router and it’s only ~330Mbps down ~180Mbps up…
Can it really be that much faster?
I have tmobile and a local provider for fiber. 5G Tmobile caps out around 912, similar to my fiber.
I’ve seen 900Mbps with Bell in low-congestion areas at off-peak times, with an iPhone 13 Pro 5 years ago.
I get 650 Mbps with T-mobile in my city.
The fact that the outdoor version is directional kind of limits its adoption in mobile usage, doesn't it? Most similar products have omnidirectional antenna. Can't imagine you would rotate it by hand on a boat towards the land while on passage
This product targets businesses where they will mount it in a fixed position and target a specific tower so they get the best throughput.
In their promotional video they call out mobile applications and they showing a car driving with it on top of it.
Did you read through the press release?
Not GP but I’m trying to figure out what you’re insinuating.
> For tougher environments or deployments with poor indoor cellular coverage, the outdoor model maintains the same high performance cellular connectivity with improved antenna performance in a durable IP67 rated enclosure. It is built for rooftop installs, off site locations, and mobile deployments where reliability is critical. Just like its indoor counterpart, you can also connect it via any PoE port, anywhere on your network, greatly simplifying cabling requirements.
And the first image they show of the outdoor model is it installed in a fixed location on a rooftop.
The video shows it on a moving vehicle
Your quote lists mobile deployments, their bullet point also says:
>Built for rooftops, remote sites, and vehicle based setups
They are insinuating if you actually read their press release then you would not state it was targeted only at stationary deployments.
Based on the spec sheet 2 out of its 6 antennas are directional, this is probably a 4x4 modem so it must have some way to switch 2 antenna from directional to omni.
I think it’s going to be targeting mostly stationary HA redundant uplinks. Backup for primary uplink or low usage primary link. In those scenarios pointing at your nearest antenna fixed is much better than an omnidirectional antenna.
They clearly mention mobile use and show it on the animation as well. Which is why I am surprised.
The spec sheet mentions 6 antennas and implies only 2 are directional:
(6) Embedded cellular antennas, including (2) high-gain for downlink: peak 9 dBi, 85°x85°
Typically these modems are 4x4 mimo so it must have some method for switching the 2 directional with 2 of the omnis in it based on which ones is needed.
https://techspecs.ui.com/unifi/integrations/u5g-max-outdoor?...
These things are nice when they work but when they don't you're completely in the dark. Even figuring out how much GB is left on your simcard is a nightmare.
Simplest solution is to get an unlimited card. Problem solved.
Why do limited cards even exist? Turns out there are various reasons (no need to go into them here).
Do you know if we can use the T-Mobile home Internet? I think they require their own modem, but I’m not sure.
You can if it supports IMEI spoofing (which I doubt). You definitely can use GL inet 5G routers if you want an alternative
I wonder if this works any better than their Unifi LTE Backup. That was so bad I gave up on it after about a month. The biggest problem was the weird way the router handled routes meant that with the LTE on the network, even when it wasn't being used a bunch of router features were impaired. Like static routes.
Ubiquiti makes some good hardware but their software is full of terrible bugs.
How does this differ from Invisagig?
US Verizon SIM support?
I think Verizon is an eSIM option on the modem; dunno about the Router version, but I’d want to assume it’s the same?
Either way, having modems that are fully unlocked for Stateside usage for once is a nice touch. Their LTE line was essentially AT&T-locked, or unlocked but only supporting AT&T in the US, so this is a nice improvement.
So Ubiquity is trustworthy again?
After the 2.4GHz wifi issues with UDM I swore I will never buy them again.
I've been running a base UDM for a long time without any 2.4GHz issues -- is there something specific that was broken?
I live near 5G relay and I was surprised that I could get symmetrical 1gbps connection, without any cables. Still remembering 56k modem, it feels like magic.
This device came out just after I already got Fios 2GB and Comcast 2GB for load balancing / failover.
If both of them go down, I doubt 5G will matter much. Not like I have a big UPS in the house anyways.
> Up to 2 Gbps downlink
> 2.5 Gbit/s PoE to upstream switch
Can anybody explain to me why these supposedly premier networking devices are lacking so much in bandwidth? I get it that mmWave is really only ever realistically going to hit 2.5G over the air, but is there any reason why they're not willing to provide at least 10G copper, or an actual SFP port? Hell, even Macs support 10G these days. I never understood this. Do they mean 2 Gbps downlink per client, or per device in total? If it's the former, 2.5G wired seems like a major bottleneck to any serious consumption.
If a single client at 2 Gbps is all the promise of 5G amounted to, well, it would be disappointing to say the least.
Probably because of the PoE. That discards SFP+, and makes difficult PoE over copper, as you'd probably need 802.3bt PoE++ (that probably most of the Unifi devices aren't compatible with), or a very short cable to avoid interference.
10Gb interfaces also tend to run quite hot and be a bit power hungry.
This is a device that needs to be in a location with good 5G reception, so it makes sense to be PoE powered so you can put it near a window or in the location that gets the best reception, and only run a long ethernet cable. And, although I don't like it too much, 2.5G or 5G NBASE-T is the nearest thing that covers 5G speeds.
The 2Gb downlink speed is the 5G downlink, the max for the whole 5G connection, so 2.5Gb ethernet is enough for that.
This is a modem, it itself is the client of a cell tower/base station. So unless you put it in a faraday cage with the base station next to it, 2G is almost certainly enough.
The better reason to put a 10G transceiver in this would be that some (cheap, honestly garbage) SFP+ transceivers can’t negotiate anything between 1G and 10G. But I’ve only seen that on bargain-bin hardware so I don’t know that they should be designing products around it.
This device is PoE. I’d guess peak wattage has a lot to do with it.
The whole 2.5 G spec is a weird step for ethernet speeds too. It's unfortunate it took off.
They said the same thing about 40G but hey, I've loved it for bridging the gap between my two (10G and 100G, respectively) Mikrotik switches. You can have a dozen Gigabit ports, as well as up to four true 10G devices on your aggregation switch, and neither would be bottlenecked by traffic to and from the backside. This has been a massive boon. However, when it comes to 2.5G, I struggle to find one good reason to use it; such a tiny step-up in bandwidth, and for what?
> However, when it comes to 2.5G, I struggle to find one good reason to use it; such a tiny step-up in bandwidth, and for what?
Portability and heat. You can get a small USB 2.5G adapter that produces negligible heat, but a Thunderbolt 10G adapter is large and produces a substantial amount of heat.
I use 10G at home, but the adapter I throw into my laptop bag is a tiny 2.5G adapter.
I’m sure it depends on the model, but in my experience if you force a 10G copper transceiver to 2.5G the insane heat generation goes away. I don’t have any Thunderbolt 10G adapters, but I’m kind of surprised they’re much larger. A SFP+ transceiver is the same size as a SFP one.
I think a major reason for the size is for heat dissipation, because it has to be prepared to handle the heat of a full 10G copper connection. Mine runs hot.
Most of my cables coming out of the aggregation switch are DAC and fiber, but there is no 10G copper because my PC came with 10G copper NIC integrated. Anyway, the difference in heat between this transceiver is shockingly large.
I knew it runs hot before I deployed it, but I wasn't aware that you have to wait for it to cooldown before unplugging, or you get burnt.
1x PCIE 3.0 has 8 Gbps raw speed - for 2.5Gbps duplex Ethernet you'll need 6~7 Gbps of raw link to CPU.
For 5Gbps and higher, you'll need another PCIE line - and SOHO motherboards are usually already pretty tight on PCIE lanes.
10GbE will require 4x3.0 lanes
> 10GbE will require 4x3.0 lanes
3.0 PCIE is irrelevant today when it comes to devices you want on 10G. I'm pretty sure the real reason is that 2.5G can comfortably run on cable you used for 1G[1], while 10G get silly hot or requires transceiver and user understanding of a hundred 2-3 letter acronyms.
Combine it with IPS speeds lagging behind. 2.5G while feels odd to some, makes total sense on consumer market.
[1]: at short distances, I had replaced one run with shielded cable to get 2.5G, but it had POE, so it might contribute to noise?)
PCIe is full duplex. And there's no requirement for ethernet ports to be able to do full tilt. Even with a 1x PCIe 3.0, a 10G port will be much much better than a 2.5G one.
(But PCIe 3.0 of course is from 2010 and isn't too relevant today - 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 and 7.0 have 16/32/64/128 Gbps per lane respectively)
Are motherboards commonly using PCIe 3.0 for onboard peripherals these days? I wouldn’t expect it to save them much money, but my PCIe knowledge is constrained to the application layer - I know next to nothing about the PHY or associated costs.
This is got to be it!
40G on Mikrotik is just channel bonding of 4 10G links at layer 2. It’s not like the vast majority of 100G that does layer 1 bonding. I really don’t know why they did it other than to have a bigger number on the spec sheet - I can’t imagine they save any money having a weird MAC setup almost nobody else uses on a few low-volume models.
I think you answered your own question - also the places where mmWave is available, there is also often other better internet connection options.
Can't wait for this to get OpenWrt support so I can buy it and the first thing I do to be to nuke the UBNT firmware.
Is OpenWRT on Unifi APs any good? I hadn’t heard of it before, and I couldn’t find any performance comparisons on a quick search. Ubiquiti has gone downhill on a lot of things the last 5 years or so, but their radio firmware has always been a step up (within their price range) for me. I wouldn’t mind ditching the Unifi controller software though.
I'm using an U6+ with OpenWRT on it, flashed straight after unboxing and it's the only thing serving wireless in my household
It's alright except for some shenanigans with DHCP trying to compete with the router, I fixed that by just disabling DHCP on the AP if I recall correctly.
Speeds are pretty much as advertised on the box, the main thing using wireless is the TV as it has a 100mbit LAN port and it it's always smooth sailing. VLAN-separated SSIDs work great as well.
I’m surprised there aren’t any better options than flashing over a U6+
I don't recall their latest hardware is supported, but why would you want that anyway if you're not looking to go all in on their controller stack?
The controller is annoying and changes completely every 6 months, and for home I use basically none of its features beyond configuring the AP. Virtualy all the issues I’ve had with Unifi APs were controller bugs, telling the AP firmware to do stupid things when it could have done literally nothing.
That said, I have some concerns that the OpenWRT AP firmware is not as optimized as the Unifi firmware is for that specific hardware. Mostly for wireless performance, but I also don’t want to hit some weird CPU bottleneck.
If you dislike their UI, not going to try to convince you, but it is part of the value of the system.
Have you looked at Mikrotik? They offer a more traditional autonomous OS w/o controllers and both a nice CLI and a powerful GUI tool.
There are several other companies (e.g. Teltonika, glinet) that offer similar solutions that can use OpenWrt today
Just bought a Gl.iNet Puli. It's only 4G but seems like a better option if you want to supply internet to some devices that you move around. Planning to use it for setup and management of a headless presentation PC as it can directly be connected to the LAN port.
Does it support eSIM? For backup internet, eSIM is good for avoiding monthly subscription, by paying per GB when needed.
I have a mobile 4g router from them and it supports physical esim. I even managed to get their suggested card for cheap. They have some support in their firmware to set it up, so you can do that fully on the router.
I have read that people managed to get an eSIM installed on it, but I think there are also physical eSIM options. See https://www.gl-inet.com/solutions/esim/
Edit: The SIMPoYo eSIM Physical Card (see https://www.gl-inet.com/campaign/simpoyo-cards/ ) seems really cool, may even be nice for a phone.
I gotta say, I hate it when companies use “xxx bits per second”, whether its Mega or Giga nobody uses bits per second and for the average consumer it’s very unclear that this differs from bytes.
Having to explain to relatives and such that “yeah you actually have to divide that by 8” is a hassle and I get tricked by it subconsciously at times as well.
2 gbps meaning 250 megabytes per second is a SCAM. A marketing sham at it’s finest.
“I have 100 mbps download” meaning “I get 12.5 megabytes download per second” is ridiculous!!
Networking only uses bits/s. Nobody in the networking world talks in bytes/s, and pretty much nobody in the data transfer world does.
The only industry that talks in bytes/s is parts of the storage space, because they relate to files, that are measured in bytes/s. And even them use both: the data link is in bits/s (e.g. SATA 6 is 6Gbps, NVMe uses the same bits/s than PCIe (1)) while the drive is usually in bytes/s (µSD cards, NVMe SSDs, etc).
When you look at the industry at large, throughput is virtually always measured in bits/s. HDMI is in bits/s. Video codecs measures bitrates in bits/s. Audio codecs measures bitrates in bits/s. PCIe is in bits/s (1). Ethernet is measured in bits/s. Wifi is measured in bits/s. You get the picture.
The good thing about keeping it consistent is that values are relatable. Streaming services naturally talk in bitrate for the video quality, and your ISP also talks in bits/s. You can compare the two numbers. Bytes/s is only really useful for on the spot jobs that you do once, like transferring photos from an SD card to your computer. Otherwise, it's just a unit.
(1): ackhstually pcie measures speeds in transfers/s because they include the 8b10b/64b66b encoding overhead and TLP overhead but I digress.
That’s not marketing related at all. It’s how network speeds have been measured long before ISPs were a business.
A byte per second is no more intuitive than a nibble per second or a bit per second. You might be used to byte as a power user because of storage, but I assure you that to regular people “256 gigabytes” is a meaningless number as well.
If you really want to piss people off, use Gibibits - 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bits. The ratio between those and Gigabytes is ~7.451.
I honestly feel mibi and gibibytes per second are the easiest units to rationalise about. The data I am transferring is already known to me in its binary prefix unit. Seconds for that data to transfer is a trivial translation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
and how do you feel about HDD vendors (and Apple) using giga-/tera- for their strictly SI power-of-ten and not power-of-two meaning?
This ship sailed out of view a long time ago, the only GB you’ll see that is still base-2 is RAM. And that’s only because you literally can’t address physical RAM in non power-of-2 blocks in most architectures.
Wait until you find out about network endianness.
We're doing ads on HN now?
Sir, this might not be a Wendy's, but this is a VC owned site that regularly shills its questionable investments.
And for most of the people here, buying any 5G mmWave modem is a questionable investment.
I would speculate that most tech purchases by HN crowd are questionable investments. But life is not a spreadsheet.
I see you've never opened HN during an Apple product launch event
The majority of posts are ads on HN
Did you know there is an entire post category for ads and self-promotion? https://news.ycombinator.com/show