Comment by ubntthrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ubntthrow | Hacker News Reader

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> That said I definitely strongly recommend against using anything UniFi based for routing/gateway tasks at this point (author mentions their AIO custom hardware UDM thing). They have significant issues now in WiFi and even switching, but at least remain kind of workable there. But the company has been an absolutely depressing development dumpster fire for years now and the trajectory still appears aimed straight down.

This is depressing to read because I worked a Ubiquiti before things got bad. The company culture took a huge dive when the CEO began removing executives and managers that were getting things done. The company was always weird, but when I started they were good about finding strong engineers who cared about networking and letting us build good products.

Everything changed when they tried to reoganize the company around the UDM and move development to China. The UDM reorg was so awful that employees and executives were leaving in droves. For months we couldn't even tell who was supposed to be in charge of UDM or UniFi because so many people left at once. I think we had 4 different UniFi lead developers get hired and then quit a few months later after the early employees all left.

Sad situation. Ubiquiti was a cool company that paid well and let engineers do good work when I joined. I still wonder why it had to fall apart so fast. The company was never perfect but it was sad to watch the CEO drive away all of the good parts of the company.

Thank you for sharing, and agreed it's a really sad situation. What an absolute total waste on a variety of fronts, from the engineering to the community. I'm only on the outside looking in as a small (<$100k) customer, though I've seen other ex-UBNT engineers comment over the last few years too. From the operator side it's been really painful watching so much promise and such a great community wither, not merely in a slow fashion but with actively hostile measures like nuking the forums and what minimal bug/feature tracking we had in favor of the horrible new-web thing they've got now. So much lost just there. And literally just nothing to be done. Last I checked Pera owned a super majority of the stock and had a tiny compliant board, so there isn't even any hope of shareholder intervention. Pressure from the financial side is a really lagging indicator in networking due to what a irreversible tipping point type of movement function customers have.

What a shame. Thanks though for your own small part in doing something pretty special. If nothing else Edge/airMax/airFiber/UniFi opened a lot of our eyes to what SMB networking could be vs abominations like old Cisco.

> Last I checked Pera owned a super majority of the stock

I think everyone should be worried when a company founder/CEO of a tech firm starts doing silly stuff like going out and buying a professional basketball team. That's never a good sign.

Is there a company that these people are going to? What Ubiquiti/Unifi alternatives do you like?

I’ve heard good things about MicroTik. Not as consumer-friendly as Uniquiti Unifi, but solid engineering from a company that seems to really understand networking at the 1/2.5/10/25/40 Gig Ethernet scale for anything from SOHO to small/medium size businesses.

Don’t have any personal experience with them, however.

MicroTik is solid and I used one of their routers for a few years. However, there's no support with mDNS across VLANs. You can obviously roll your own solution, but who has time for that? I prefer to have my IoT devices on a separate VLAN. Without support from the router, you're SoL if you want your devices to be discoverable by HomeKit and other services.

At the moment I'm using Unifi for my router, but I'd consider switching to something as secure as Mikrotik but with support for mDNS across VLANs.

TP-Link Omada

Ruckus for Wifi. More expensive, but way better.

money talks https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UI/ubiquiti/gross-...

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