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Comment by GekkePrutser | Hacker News Reader

You have any links to those stories? Would be interesting.

Personally I hate the way they're going towards cloud accounts and dedicated management boxes. We used to be able to just install a docker to manage everything but the latest hardware ranges (eg their video offering) require dedicated management hardware. They're also pretty slow with uptake on new standards like WiFi 6 and now 6E.

The ideal selling point of ubiquiti was self-managed near-enterprise quality hardware with free self-hosted management and decent hardware prices.

I can't fully blame them because I know venture capital idealises subscription pricing and data mining right now but it won't work for me and it's annoying having to look for another option again when I'm invested in their ecosystem.

But anyway it would be interesting to read more about what's going on behind the scenes.

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"Gotchanomics" is such a shitty model - you get something valuable, begin to trust the vendor, establish a system with their equipment, and then they pull a bait and switch, trying to get away with shitty service, mediocre replacements for good products, moving services to the cloud and subscription based nonsense - Nickel&Dime As A Service.

If I'm faced with paying premium rates, I'm going with Cisco and premium vendors. Ubiquiti's value was good equipment at reasonable prices to the point that you could buy spares for reliability and save 90% of the cost of service contracts from premium vendors. That differential was the absolute wrong space for them to try to tap for more profit, because nothing else was special about the brand. Cheap, decent, "good enough" network gear is now a market available for exploitation, ubiquiti has lost it.

> "Gotchanomics" is such a shitty model - you get something valuable, begin to trust the vendor, establish a system with their equipment, and then they pull a bait and switch, trying to get away with shitty service, mediocre replacements for good products, moving services to the cloud and subscription based nonsense - Nickel&Dime As A Service.

Exactly, well put.

For what it's worth, as I have been bitten by this practice of "gotchanomics" too many times that I've become a bit sensitive to any signs pointing to it.

I'm not 100% sure Unifi is doing this with their existing products, but new ranges like the video stuff require a modern management box which in turn requires a cloud account as far as I've heard. I've decided not to buy those for this reason. But it undermines my confidence in buying new gear for the ecosystem because it really feels like this will be the next step.

Like for example i have switches that get confused and started reporting things are connected to ports 57-62 (on a 24 port switch) and switching them wrong, etc.

UI they have been slowly screwing up more and more for years (How many years are they into the "new UI" migration for the controller?).

But the actual switching is pretty basic stuff (and a separate hardware chip they are driving that is not hard to drive), and simply shouldn't be going wrong in this way.

I've also got a UDM-SE and UDM-Pro that seem to have hardware issues on the SFP+ uplink when connected in certain ways (and won't break 500mbps upstream) no matter what SFP+ module is connected (fiber, dac, etc) if the LAN SFP+ port is connected at 10gbps. All the same modules work in every other router (mikrotik, etc) connected the exact same way. (yes, before HN tries to debug this, IDS/etc is all turned off. There are no nft rules, no nothing, i have debugged this to death through the actual shell). Others have had the same issue.

They also have an $1800 ptz camera that can't follow objects even when it detects them (This is 100% basic functionality of a PTZ camera, especially at this pricepoint), despite promising it for years.

I have lots of these kinds of "why is basic functionality broken or missing" stories. Ubiquiti gets it out the door, says they'll fix it all in post, and moves on to the next thing.

They aren't a hardware manufacturer, they are a bad AAA game developer :)

Can confirm, same issues with SFP+ on my UDM-Pro. The software updates for this thing have been so bad the last year, incredibly buggy, it's infuriating.

My current favorite was the update to the AP Pro APs that broke everything if you were using a wireless uplink (I was using one to bridge a semi-decent signal to my garage). Clients connected to that AP had zero connectivity to anything else, despite the Controller saying "all good!"

Gee... I'm glad I walked away from it. I was about to go for UDM-Pro when updating my home network devices. Then I read some HN saying they were putting ads to the console pages. But that wasn't really about product itself. What you mentioned were really really serious product issues in areas I suppose almost every other vendors are rock solid.

> ...venture capital idealises subscription pricing right now...

Pera owns ~91% of the company, it all comes from the top.

If you've set up a local-only controller, avoiding cloud nags, and poked around via SSH on their boxes, you'll realize it's nice, solid, hardware but the adoption process is a brittle and buggy mess. The controller is Java and Mongodb and picky to install but fortunately someone is making dockerfiles for it.

I think it's still an okay value but you need to watch your flanks.

You can still use their products without a dedicated box or cloud accounts by running the UnifFi admin console in your own network. Can you clarify what you mean?

I understand that the UDM range of products can no longer be set up without a cloud account, and none of the video products can he hosted locally.

I was thinking of a newer gateway as the USG is too slow to do decent IDS. And the video for my home.. But I didn't buy either for this reason. I looked at it about 2 years ago.

It feels like they want to do the same with the older network gear but they just won't because there will be too much backlash from the move.

All of my wireless gear and most of my switching is UniFi running against a self-hosted controller without cloud access. This works fine.

However, UniFi Protect is hardware only. You have to have either a UDM, a CloudKey Gen2 Plus, or a UNVR. I bought into Protect a couple years ago and now I'm sort of stuck with it. I _think_ that I could de-provision the cameras from my UNVR and use them standalone with BlueIris or Frigate but I've heard stories that they gimp the RTSP resolution on the G4 Pro camera (of which I have three).

They don't necessarily promote their self-hosting software method of Unifi management, and they outright removed support for Unifi Protect unless you buy hardware.

Want your surveillance video to be cloud-hosted or on your own pre-existing RAID? Pound sand!

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