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I installed Ubiquiti at home and it was a terrible experience. I really wanted it to work, but my wife teased me long enough about my "professional grade" insta

by TomVDB 8y ago

I installed Ubiquiti at home and it was a terrible experience. I really wanted it to work, but my wife teased me long enough about my "professional grade" installation that I gave up. She was right. The biggest issue was range, which was much worse than what I got with I had with a traditional consumer access point (I had a TP-Link Archer C7.) It was not even close. The handover didn't work very well either. Much older UniFi products used Qualcomm wifi chipset which had excellent hand-over, the later versions used Broadcom which didn't have that yet. I replaced everything with Eero, which just worked. The AmpliFi product line of Ubiquiti supposedly offers similar features as Eero, but that didn't exist yet when I made the switch.

tbyehl 8y ago
The problem with UniFi is people read about how great it was for someone who somewhat haphazardly flung a few APs around their house and lived happily ever after... and for many it's just not going to work out that way. A lot of work can go into making WiFi work well. With multiple APs you've got to adjust the Transmit power (defaults to Auto, which means High, which is generally bad). For good roaming, increasing the minRSSI is critical. 5G and 2.4G have very different propagation characteristics so they need to be optimized individually. With several APs you may even want to disable 2.4G on some of them. Band Steering may or may not play nicely with the devices you have. Some devices have trouble if they can see many APs advertising the same SSID -- Ring Doorbells are notorious for not being willing to associate to an SSID at all if many APs are advertising the same SSID. At my old house I got away with one AP placed centrally in the attic and another in my detached garage. At my new house, at about 2.5X the size, I'm running 5 APs and it has taken me a solid month of fiddling to get my devices consistently associating to the best AP and roaming appropriately.
- leesalminen 8y ago
  > For good roaming, increasing the minRSSI is critical. This! I thought the UAPs sucked until I played with transmit power and especially min RSSI. I’ve been using the UniFi line for about a year now, covering the whole property and house in rock-solid WiFi. It took a few hours of walking around with a laptop and tinkering with settings/placement but I couldn’t be happier now.

by TomVDB 8y ago

tbyehl 8y ago

The problem with UniFi is people read about how great it was for someone who somewhat haphazardly flung a few APs around their house and lived happily ever after... and for many it's just not going to work out that way. A lot of work can go into making WiFi work well. With multiple APs you've got to adjust the Transmit power (defaults to Auto, which means High, which is generally bad). For good roaming, increasing the minRSSI is critical. 5G and 2.4G have very different propagation characteristics so they need to be optimized individually. With several APs you may even want to disable 2.4G on some of them. Band Steering may or may not play nicely with the devices you have. Some devices have trouble if they can see many APs advertising the same SSID -- Ring Doorbells are notorious for not being willing to associate to an SSID at all if many APs are advertising the same SSID. At my old house I got away with one AP placed centrally in the attic and another in my detached garage. At my new house, at about 2.5X the size, I'm running 5 APs and it has taken me a solid month of fiddling to get my devices consistently associating to the best AP and roaming appropriately.

leesalminen 8y ago
> For good roaming, increasing the minRSSI is critical. This! I thought the UAPs sucked until I played with transmit power and especially min RSSI. I’ve been using the UniFi line for about a year now, covering the whole property and house in rock-solid WiFi. It took a few hours of walking around with a laptop and tinkering with settings/placement but I couldn’t be happier now.