3 ms·

What did you move to for wifi? Gateway/firewall/edge is easy to replace, but I haven't seen much that could compete with UBNT at their price point.

by vdqtp3 5y ago

xoa 5y ago
>What did you move to for wifi? I haven't moved everything on WiFi or L2 switching yet and am still evaluating that, poking at different solutions from a variety of places across price ranges (from MikroTik to Peplink or Ruckus). Part of the true pain of all this is that there isn't any clear obvious successor to all the things Ubiquiti aimed for or else a lot more of us would have probably bailed completely already vs drawing things out. Not merely the price point, which I'd actually be fine paying somewhat more for given how important it is, but zero cloud dependency, the fairly pleasant (though getting worse) single pane of glass for managing things, and decent physical design that doesn't look like giant mutant space bugs all matter. However, even in WiFi it has started to get flakier and while the older WiFi 5 devices which benefited from what was once a lot of great engineering talent have held on my experience with the newer WiFi 6 stuff has been mediocre. And the controller has continued to go downhill as well, actively removing useful functionality and information density as they keep messing with the UI every single version in the most classic bikeshedding fashion :(. WiFi 6E/WiFi 7 and multigig will I think be the major decision point, so another 1-3 years. 6 GHz spectrum will be genuinely very useful in a variety of settings, so we're going to be looking at a point where it'll be desirable to replace a lot of hardware anyway. Once there is that kind of commitment that's going to represent not wanting to change again for another 5-7 years, well, might as well reevaluate. And I hate it but I just don't see Ubiquiti getting better. I will say that with a touch of irony, Ubiquiti's rot spiral has actually reinforced the value of Ubiquiti's approach IMO. Because such things can happen to any company, and at least with UniFi/UNMS the self-host control thing has worked out exactly the last-resort backstop we all always said it could. There isn't any required cloud tie. There isn't any forced firmware updates. The system can be quite well isolated, with routing/gateway gone the rest can go onto a dedicated management VLAN with zero ingress/egress. That leaves a lot more runway even without updates. I'm sorry it was needed but it makes me more determined then ever to avoid remote dependencies. So I'll thank Ubiquiti for that I guess :\.
fy20 5y ago
I replaced an old Unifi AP with a TP Link EAP 245 v3 and its been running fine for 3 months. They have some equally complicated to setup provisioning software like Ubiquiti (when you have just one device it's overkill), however you can actually configure everything on the device directly from the web interface, and no cloud required (I spent an hour trying to set it up before I realised this....). It is classed AC1750, so the same as a UAP-AC-PRO which is around €150 here. I paid €95, so quite a bit cheaper. They also have some WiFi 6 (AX) devices, but I don't have any compatible clients so didn't bother with those. https://www.tp-link.com/us/business-networking/omada-sdn-access-point/eap245/ https://www.tp-link.com/us/business-networking/omada-sdn-acc...
apple4ever 5y ago
Ruckus for me. Single AP replaced too, and has been way better.

What did you move to for wifi? Gateway/firewall/edge is easy to replace, but I haven't seen much that could compete with UBNT at their price point.

by vdqtp3 5y ago

What did you move to for wifi? Gateway/firewall/edge is easy to replace, but I haven't seen much that could compete with UBNT at their price point.

xoa 5y ago

>What did you move to for wifi? I haven't moved everything on WiFi or L2 switching yet and am still evaluating that, poking at different solutions from a variety of places across price ranges (from MikroTik to Peplink or Ruckus). Part of the true pain of all this is that there isn't any clear obvious successor to all the things Ubiquiti aimed for or else a lot more of us would have probably bailed completely already vs drawing things out. Not merely the price point, which I'd actually be fine paying somewhat more for given how important it is, but zero cloud dependency, the fairly pleasant (though getting worse) single pane of glass for managing things, and decent physical design that doesn't look like giant mutant space bugs all matter. However, even in WiFi it has started to get flakier and while the older WiFi 5 devices which benefited from what was once a lot of great engineering talent have held on my experience with the newer WiFi 6 stuff has been mediocre. And the controller has continued to go downhill as well, actively removing useful functionality and information density as they keep messing with the UI every single version in the most classic bikeshedding fashion :(. WiFi 6E/WiFi 7 and multigig will I think be the major decision point, so another 1-3 years. 6 GHz spectrum will be genuinely very useful in a variety of settings, so we're going to be looking at a point where it'll be desirable to replace a lot of hardware anyway. Once there is that kind of commitment that's going to represent not wanting to change again for another 5-7 years, well, might as well reevaluate. And I hate it but I just don't see Ubiquiti getting better. I will say that with a touch of irony, Ubiquiti's rot spiral has actually reinforced the value of Ubiquiti's approach IMO. Because such things can happen to any company, and at least with UniFi/UNMS the self-host control thing has worked out exactly the last-resort backstop we all always said it could. There isn't any required cloud tie. There isn't any forced firmware updates. The system can be quite well isolated, with routing/gateway gone the rest can go onto a dedicated management VLAN with zero ingress/egress. That leaves a lot more runway even without updates. I'm sorry it was needed but it makes me more determined then ever to avoid remote dependencies. So I'll thank Ubiquiti for that I guess :\.

fy20 5y ago

I replaced an old Unifi AP with a TP Link EAP 245 v3 and its been running fine for 3 months. They have some equally complicated to setup provisioning software like Ubiquiti (when you have just one device it's overkill), however you can actually configure everything on the device directly from the web interface, and no cloud required (I spent an hour trying to set it up before I realised this....). It is classed AC1750, so the same as a UAP-AC-PRO which is around €150 here. I paid €95, so quite a bit cheaper. They also have some WiFi 6 (AX) devices, but I don't have any compatible clients so didn't bother with those. https://www.tp-link.com/us/business-networking/omada-sdn-access-point/eap245/ https://www.tp-link.com/us/business-networking/omada-sdn-acc...

apple4ever 5y ago

Ruckus for me. Single AP replaced too, and has been way better.