A number of responses to your post claim disappointingly low throughput on the Ubiquiti access points. Having just installed one myself, I was also initially disappointed...until I discovered that the default settings limit peak speeds to about 25% of what's possible with these Ubiquity APs.
I have the UAP-AC-Pro model; two configuration changes from the default yielded speeds as fast as any other access point I've encountered: 500+ Mbits up and down, as measured with iperf3 to a (wired) local box.
There may be good reasons for these defaults, but, briefly, the access point is factory set to use 40MHz channel widths for 802.11ac, and to reserve radio bandwidth for a wireless uplink. To resolve:
1) Update the 5GHz radio to use an 80 MHz channel width (really, two channels); this doubles effective throughput. In the Unifi interface, choose your AP from the devices menu, go to Config > Radios > Radio 5G and choose "VHT80" from the dropdown for channel width.
2) Uncheck the "Enable connectivity monitor and wireless uplink" box in the Unifi main "Site" settings panel; this also nearly doubled sustained throughput, though unfortunately it means your access point doesn't check whether it's disconnected from the Internet. (This may or may not be a problem for you. For me, it means my Internet is down, and it's not useful for my AP to know this too.)
I'm posting this in the hopes that it spares a few hours of Googling for someone else who, like me, was initially disappointed by Ubiquiti's access point speeds!
That's a good tip however the AP AC LITE I bought was set to VHT by default.
If you really want super high wifi bandwidth and range the pro/hd APs are what you want to go with.
That said the Wifi performance on the AP LITE I have is better than the performance on some of my previous high end routers like the ASUS AC-87u which is a 2400MBP/s rated router with 1733MBPs Wave2 TurboQAM enabled 5G radio.
Most of my network is wired and I have 2 Unifi AP LITE access points (I don't really need 2 for a 2 bed 78 sq/m apartment but it was a package deal for me), and it performs better than the Nighthawk and the ASUS routers I have.
I'll check the connectivity monitor to see if I can squeeze even more simultaneous bandwidth so thanks for that tip.
Hmm. On the Pro, all 5G radio options are "VHT" -- default on mine was VHT40, and switching to VHT80 is what helped. Does the LITE version allow you to choose one over the other?
It was setup for VHT80 it could be a firmware issue or that I’ve selected a different option during the setup, but I never had to change it to get the full troughput that said the LITE is limited to 800mb/s on 5G.
I wouldn’t say dirt cheap - one could pickup 20€ WiFi with router capabilities and be happy with it.. Cheapest ubiquity here was somewhere around 80€ for just basestation. However I did pickup their router and WiFi for something like 160€ and couldnt be happier. Router software seemed superb in configuration options and signal strength covered my house without a breeze whereas I previously had 2. My best tech purchase for 2017.
I picked up a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X for 49 GBP and a Unifi AP-AC Lite for 60 GBP. It is dirt cheap when considering the options you have for what you are getting, if you live in Europe interface wise FritzBox is (or well was) great but they are really cheaping out on the hardware, their QoS is a joke and they are stuffing their cloud and remote access services down your throat constantly to the point where I no longer trust the boxes.
In the UK A mid to high end linksys or an ASUS-RT router would cost you north of 180 GBP, anything below 150 GBP or so is often not better than what you get from the ISP here, both BT has a decent box for the braindead and some small ISPs like Zen offer mid range FritzBoxes (3XXX series).
Before that I've basically was running DD-WRT but I just gave up on it, too many problems, advanced features are not supported, issues with routers, security issues taking a long ass time to fix and unless I'm willing to script everything It became unmanageable via the web interface.
I also consider the ubiquiti purchase as one if not the best tech purchase of 2017, I didn't realize the prices came down so much when I was looking at it as an option a few years ago it was 3 or more times the price.
I bought a Ubiquiti Unifi or whatever their access points is called. It cost me around $200 but it gives me kinda of shit wifi-speeds. I have 250mbit/s and get like 100 over the air.
I have changed settings many times, but it just seems capped for some reason.
I get just over 100mbit/s so it's a gigabit port with Cat6 shielded TP. I use an Edge Router X and when I plug my computer straight into that by cable I get the speed I should get which is 250mbit/s.
I took the parent's suggestion as being targeted for the HN audience; I agree that for most people, it's impossible to use, but for the readers here, I'd say it's an apt recommendation.
Not as far as i know they use EdgeOS for the routers and AirOS for their managed APs, with a few others for their SGAs and managed switches.
As far as I know they never used OpenWRT or anything like it, if they did they hid it very well to the point where it would be legal for them to remove it from their license agreements.
The CLI and the file system you can see on the router looks and acts nothing like OpenWRT.
If that is your experience then thair guided setup has improved a lot over the years, besides configuring VLANs later because I have a few talkative devices on the network and I don't want crosstalk I didn't had to do anything other than to run their setup.
It configured the WAN interface, created the switch interface with the number of LAN ports I wanted, forced me to change the password, suggested that I should change the default username which removes the ubnt default username system completely, asked on which interfaces I wanted to turn UPNP on and enabled the firewall by default.
Really? Show me a consumer grade router that can handle anything near the PPS even the cheapest edgerouter can and router with proper QoS implementation that actually works.
100 uplink utilization with no affect on latency isn’t something I’ve seen before on consumer routers even with rate limiting and fencing.
Even wireless... I have over 20 clients going and they handle it just fine, even transferring massive files. I can easily max out wireless AC. Maybe you're experience is with their older APs?
Completely disagree. It crushes Meraki and any consumer gear I've ever used in range AND throughput in all my testing. It seems like it's also pretty important to talk about what gear you're discussing, too.
I agree. Like a lot of us here, I can build (and have built) my own networking gear starting with an empty hard drive and a Linux/BSD installer. I don't have to use an off-the-shelf networking solution. That said, Eero "just works" and much better than anything I've ever built myself. The mesh stuff delivers on its promises: I can start watching a video in my living room, then wander about the house hopping from AP to AP without dropping a single frame. My family doesn't pester me about idiosyncrasies. My kids' friends talk about our wifi being much better than what they have at home.
I could not possibly love Eero more. I hope they make it through this unscathed!
Another vote for Amplifi. I have an unusual home (several additions over the years meaning "exterior" walls on the inside, single story, large) and using Amplifi I have full bars anywhere in the house or on my property.
They're a little trigger-happy with the firmware updates (one recent update bricked DNS) but otherwise it's a fire-and-forget solution.
I found Netgear's Orbi really great consumer devices. I am using them exclusively at home now and they are great. They support ethernet or wifi backhaul, can build an actual mesh if you need but have really great out of the box performance with just the satellite(s) connecting to the router.
Definitely the most stable wifi setup I have ever owned and they also provide OpenVPN and a bunch of other nice things out of the box.
I have odd issues with some of my devices every few weeks, though none of my Apple stuff, where they seem to stop getting DHCP leases (or stop using them?) for no discernible reason.
Restarting the Google box always fixes it, but it’s extremely annoying.
That was never an issue with my AirPort in charge of things.
It gets automatic regular firmware updates to stay insync with Chrome OS, so it should always be patched.
It has a dead simple user interface, though it means many power user features are not there. Though there is a project out there to root the device and do more with it. https://github.com/marcosscriven/galeforce
While it's true that it has a relatively simple user interface, I've found that it has every feature I've wanted and I'm generally a power user. I can set access schedules for my kids' devices. It even has a "porn" filter but I don't use that so I don't know if it's effective. I can prioritize certain devices so they get first dibs at bandwidth. I can reserve static IP addresses for some devices, and I can do port forwarding.
I feel like those features and probably a few more that I couldn't think of off the top of my head are going to cover 99.99% of all users' needs. I agree there are other devices, especially if you flash your own firmware, that will give you more fine tuned control. I just didn't want to leave anyone with the impression that it lacked the major features people will be looking for.
The only feature I personally would like to use that it doesn't have is the ability to configure the router as a VPN client.
Yes, and it's by far the worst thing about it. Reset your router while there's a cable outage? Sorry, no wifi until your cable company gets the internet connection back online.
This hit me when I moved recently. I would usually fall back to just accessing the configuration on my phone's cell connection, but 1) the house I moved to has poor reception for my carrier and 2) the cable enters the house in the basement so even less signal. Cue several rounds of climbing up and down the stairs.
I switched to Ubiquiti products a few months ago and am quite happy with it. Lots of settings, modern UI, and no cloud required. I even had fun placing all the APs and whatnot.
Agreed. I've got a full UniFi setup at home and setup an AmpliFi network at my brother-in-law's house. Great gear. The range on Ubiquiti blows my old Meraki gear out of the water. I spent years tweaking settings on Meraki and was always unhappy with the range. I blamed it on everything except the gear until I replaced it.
Everyone keeps saying that Apple has abandoned the router business and I'm not sure where this is coming from. They still sell and support the AirPorts. They're even in stores.
A router isn't something that needs annual upgrades... realistically, there's not a whole lot technologically meaningful Apple could add to the product today. When 802.11ax comes around, then I'm sure Apple will make a big upgrade.
