Hacker News Reader

Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

I'll admit I'm a Ubiquiti fanboy now. I got fed-up with consumer-grade wifi gear when my old TP-Link AP+Router combi crapped out after ~20 wifi clients connected. Initially I kept the router but disabled its wi-fi AP and started using Ubiquiti APs - just one to begin with, but it handled 50+ simultaneous wi-fi clients like a champ - 6 years later I now have a UDM, PoE switch, LTE failover, three APs, and I'm considering moving-away from Google Nest to Ubiquiti for home-automation now too, because Google/Nest's video service makes no sense considering they don't let you access the video locally or save the video locally (what's the point of a video surveillance system that can be defeated simply by snipping the Internet coax connection outside?!?).

View on HN

My current APs are old and I got fiber recently so I am looking for cheap AX APs if they are worth the price. I know AX is still early but because I am in the market and both my daily devices are AX I might as well try (Unifi 6 Lite or LR though both don't support AX in 2.4GHz so something with 160MHz in 5GHz and AX in 2.4GHz). If you buy consumer AX now forget updates in a year or two. On the other hand the first AC Lite still receives updates and that board has gone through more than 30 revisions (I recently bought one for someone and that had board revision 36 or something). Sadly I haven't had the same luck with their wired routers. The EdgeRouters are running some old Debian and I have had trouble with their PPPoE client. So I flashed OpenWRT recently on it but it didn't run great (for my fiber) either. I am looking for either an R4S NanoPi or one of those protectli devices for just routing. I think in the router part these devices are not cutting it for me (I can do things like dnsmasq blocklisting and stubby with openwrt and cake sqm works great). Anyway I need to plan my WiFi 6 Fiber upgrade well otherwise its easy to get carried away and blow up the budget.

I’m a fan too! The dream machine, aps, and a poe switch were cheaper than what I’ve paid for just a single “enterprise” device before.

Ubiquiti's gear falls into a weird market segment: it's got 85% of the capability of true Enterprise-scale equipment (i.e. the kind you absolutely have to employee someone - or two, plus pager-duty, full-time for) for a fraction of the cost, but costs 2x or 3x more than the consumer-crap it's replacing - but has a _hint_ of vendor lock-in that at least with the full-time-employees you could task them with building and implementing an exit migration strategy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com