Many people who I think highly of subscribe to the benefits of mesh networking which I suppose can be summarized as simplicity, ease of use, and relatively low cost. I was almost lured into mesh when I changed my mind and decided to investigate Ubiquiti Unifi. Having chosen Ubiquiti, I'm pretty convinced I made the right choice. When I continue to hear people coming out of the woodwork lauding the mesh systems like eero, I keep wondering if their use case or preferences are that different from mine.
I've only used Ubiquiti in professional settings (offices) so I don't speak for their "home" solutions, but having used Google WiFi since it came out the advantages over other solutions is one word: simplicity.
I used to have a Netgear setup with a Nighthawk router and repeaters. It took hours of tweaking until the damn thing worked properly. Even after properly setup, performance on the main bedroom was terrible (~6Mbps down, when the living room was doing 120Mbps down consistently.) Handover between APs was terrible too: going from the living room to the bedroom there was a 50/50 chance your device would get "stuck" on the wrong AP. After installing some custom firmware for the router, I managed to improve that (there's a setting for kicking devices once the signal is below a certain threshold) but that was far from trivial. Going from bedroom to living room was even worse, as the repeater was dumb and wouldn't force a disconnect even with super low-signal. I usually had to turn wi-fi off/on on the device to force a reconnect. Let alone the amount of times the repeater would just stop repeating and needed to be unplugged from the wall to come back to life.
Installing 3 Google WiFi APs took me all of ten minutes, performance is excellent across the apartment and I don't have to deal with AP handover. It just works. And it cost about the same money as the original setup cost, with 0 of the aggravation.
Same situation here - also came close to pulling trigger on Ubiquiti gear. The Google Wifi has been gloriously simple and fast for me.
My only real criticism is the insane way it installs updates - at any time, on occasion during online work conference calls, taking the network down with it. The lack of any UI to configure this behavior is maddening.
Personally I haven't had any issues with updates at weird times (although the very first time after setting them up they took longer than I expected), but it is annoying that there's no UI to configure it. I wonder if they do some kind of load check before triggering the update? You'd expect a persistent connection to delay something like that.
I switched from Ubiquiti to Eero and couldn't be happier.
The problem with the Unifi accesspoints (I used an AC Pro) is that their reach is quite a bit lower than standard cheap access points such as a TP-Link Archer C7. The only way I'd get decent coverage in my house was to install a bunch of them, but then you'd still not have seemless handover.
At first I reverted back to My old solution of the TP-Link AP and a Netgear repeater, but once the second gen Eero came on the market, the choice was easy.
I’m curious why you didn’t have seamless handover with Ubiquiti... I have 4 Unifi AP’s and get completely seamless handoff every time, and great speeds.
same here, I have a 4500 sqft home and I use 3 Ubiquiti AC-Pros (one per floor) and I have excellent performance and coverage. In fact, in my case, two of the APs are on the same floor just that one of them is in my foyer area that is open to the upstairs and this covers the upstairs floors. And before I installed a 3rd one in my basement, I had good basement coverage there and now that I have added one to the basement, the hand offs work seamlessly. I checked and rechecked - I have roughly 15-20 wifi devices from TVs, tablets, phones, kids tablets, chrome cast, fire sticks, and probably some others I can't recall and all my devices appear localized to the nearest AP and roaming, typically with my phone and tablet, works pretty well.
For what its worth, most benchmarks and tests back up the OP was saying, that Ubiquiti stuff just doesn't have the range and speed of mid to high end consumer routers.
edit: And I am not trying to say they are bad, just that they were designed for other priorities than throughput and range.
In most cases I believe handoff is a device feature and not reliant on the ap. Ubiquiti does have a service to provide handoff for devices that don't support it but it isn't as good and is off by default.
For everyone using Ubiquiti in a home setting how do you place your access points?
From what I understand they're supposed to be ceiling mounted so the domed side is broadcasting 'down' into the room. I'd imagine most domestic users aren't wiring them into the ceiling so are you just placing them on sideboards and tables sub-optimally?
I had similar problems with Ubiquiti after moving to it from Apple Airport Extreme and Time Capsule units. The throughput and range decreased about 40% for me overall.
The best WiFi I ever had in my home was Ruckus Wireless from back when 802.11N was hot stuff. It was way too expensive to keep up with for residential but man it worked flawlessly.
OMG Yes. I pulled out my pair of Netgear R7000s, put in an EdgeRouter, CloudKey and a pair of AP-AC-HDs (wired to the ER via Gig-E), some basic managed switches (Netgear GS) and haven't looked back.
I tried the eero when it first came out - it couldn't even handle two Xboxes on the same WLAN, and was slow as molasses.
I would say their use cases are that different from yours; I suspect for most, one of the primary goals is "I can configure these magical boxes using only my phone, preferably without having to type a single thing." which is definitely not what you get with Unifi.
I pay for 150mbps from Comcast. I was getting around 40 directly next to my old Apple airport extreme. In the basement it was really bad at around 5. Spent $350 on eero and now I get 130 throughout the entire house.
For me it was by far the easiest decision and I've seen real results. Everything from online gaming to streaming are flawless.
This thread turned into eero versus Ubiquiti, but swap the brands and it’s the same Rorschach’s test as iOS versus Android.
The eero system is to WiFi as iPhone is to mobile. Either you want to fiddle with your WiFi or you don’t. I used to, now I don’t.
My home needs 3 wired hubs and 6 wireless/mesh extenders. Used to do it with flashed Linksys gear, then with AirPort Extreme plus Airport Expresses (for one relay hop, this worked very well), now with eero v2. The time I saved with eero is remarkable.
- - -
== Mini-review - Eero v2 + Eero Beacons ==
Location is 7,500 sq. ft. and 4 floors covered by 1 eero gateway wired hub and 2 relay wired hubs, 6 meshed eero Beacons, and the eero iOS app.
Setup took ~5 mins per device. Entire mesh self-updated in one go after setup.
And then it all ‘just worked’.
Wired network gets full uplink speed (235 mbps down, 35 mbps up, in my case). Wireless network maxes out at each device’s speed when direct to hubs, only mild drop off connected to eero Beacons.
Roaming is seamless, handoff quick, iOS app shows which eero base or eero Beacon each wireless device is using.
App has all the ‘advanced’ network config you actually need, tons of detail per eero and per connected device, and you can manage individual devices. You can nickname things to better keep track such as when using dozens of smart home devices like thermostats.
The philosophy of doing by and large the right configuration choices for the user worked out well. My tenants are raving about the new network[1], were able to start using WiFi calling reliably on their Samsung and Apple phones.
Apple should just buy eero.
Footnote 1: To be fair, tenants had disconnected the happily working Apple mesh in favor of D-Link because their cable guy told them to. But the D-Link wouldn’t handoff as they roamed the house, so the D-Link experience was especially bad.
It’s interesting that In this thread of Ubiquiti, no one talks much about Amplifi. Ubiquiti’s eero competitor.
I run an IT firm and have the enterprise stuff in my house, but the Amplifi is better compared to eero and is much loved in my parents house (both mine and the in laws).
What does the mesh gear offers over the combination of an access point and extender? I skimmed the Eero site and wasn't able to see any kind of a white paper. They do look great though.
If you are just taking about 1, maybe 2, extenders there is no real advantage. Now if you're talking about 2 or more extenders then the advantage is that 1 extender isn't handling all the hard work back to the primary access. The mesh network let each unit work with the other near-by units to share the load.
The disadvantage is that if you get too many mesh node they start talking to each on who can handle the load the best. That can get quite chatty reducing through put. Eero big push was for smarter meshing (less chatting, more throughput) at a cheaper price.
Yep, I was looking into Eero and Google Wifi when a friend suggested I just get a single, more powerful router instead. Got the Netgear Nighthawk and have been very happy
I can't speak for the parent, but from my perspective:
+ Very secure, with ongoing, regular software and firmware updates (this is big for me, after ASUS, DLink, et al)
+ Extremely feature-rich (both hardware and software)
+ Relatively affordable for what you get (much cheaper than Eero)
+ Modular (upgrade WAP separate from router, etc)
- Complex to setup (requires a VPS, dedicated dongle sold separately, or monthly fee)
- Not many people are set up for PoE; injectors are annoying.
It was worth it for me, as I happen to enjoy playing with VPSes. Plus, it makes it exponentially easier for me to troubleshoot my parents' WiFi when they have a problem, as it's designed to be managed remotely.
- Complex to setup (requires a VPS, dedicated dongle sold separately, or monthly fee)
I just set up Ubiquti here at home and while it wasn't super easy, I didn't find it all that bad. What required a VPS/Dongle/Fee for you? I didn't need any of that. (I have a security gateway, edge routers, and 3 pro aps.)
I bet he’s referring to having a controller but I think you can run it on your laptop, configure everything and then turn off the controller. I don’t think the controller is needed after initial configuration unless you want the stats collection.
I have the cloud key (the dongle) so I could be wrong.
It is easy but it’s still slightly harder than the average consumer would want.
You just have to make sure you turn off the feature in the APs that keeps checking if the controller is there, otherwise they stop working. Or at least that was the case when I got mine.
While I figure most of us using Ubiquiti Networks gear in our home have local VM servers that can host the controller, there are some houses where this is not the case. But in those cases, you can still run the controller in a VM on your main workstation, configure the gear, and then shut down the VM. I don't think it needs to keep running to operate the gear once it's booted. I think if you power-cycle the gear, you'd need the VM up.
I really appreciate Ubiquiti going to such lengths to allow one to install the controller locally, which in turn means you can configure and manage your gear without any cloud meddling.
That caused me to broaden my search. I recalled hearing about Ubiquiti from another group of friends/colleagues who I also respected. When the sr most network guy at my company confirmed he ran Ubiquiti Unifi APs at his home, I started looking at the price as well as trying to figure out how complex the physical setup would be (as contrasted with a mesh).
I then realized I could support my entire home with a single AP and wire the rest of the devices. This made me chose a wired+Unifi solution over a mesh one like eero.
Big fan of ubiquity APs myself, but you may still want more than one AP depending on how many clients you have. I am at about 13-15 clients once you add everything together and I find my spectrum a little crowded. The range on the LR is fantastic though, it reaches to a block away from my home when turned on high (I lowered the signal strength), not that my devices have a strong enough chip to talk back to it though.
I bought the most likely overkill UAP AC HD to solve for the density problem. https://unifi-hd.ubnt.com/ At the time, I was under the delusion I'd be building a smart home. I have since dialed back my requirements but have (hopefully) excess wi-fi capacity.
One thing to consider with true mesh networking is that each meshed hop halves the available throughput. Wifi is already half duplex so with a large network this can cause noticeable latency and throughput degradation.
Any set of dual-band routers with repeater functionality on all but the main node will give you very good wifi coverage. I picked up some dirt cheap (like $20) ASUS AC1200 and N53/56 routers, with the latter being repeaters on separate channels. They will all run OpenWRT, once they're old enough. Not sure if you can say the same about Ubiquity or Eero.
Ubnt was a bit rough earlier on but with their recent firmware and software updates it's a real breeze. Still a bit annoying setting up their secure gateway behind a frontier router with a remote controller, but everything else is spot on. Haven't had a wifi/network problem since switching to them.
Having gifbit internet and going down a similar route you are I still question the benefit of mesh networks. It’s trivial to run some cat 6 through the walls or hide it under carpet.
I’m about to get an Ubiquiti Edge Router and an AP.
I'm in the same boat. Things are complicated by the fireplace and chimney being in the middle of the house.
I used an TP-Link Archer C-7 as the main router and an Apple Time Capsule as access point and backup connected via Powerline. Getting inconsistent throughput in the house. Tried moving the Time Capsule around but have knob-and-tube wiring in most of the house and GFCI circuits most of the rest.
Broke down and bought a Netgear Orbi because they have a dedicated 5GHz backhaul circuit. Now I have fast internet all over and the Time Capsule just does backup.
I tried Luma but they don't have the dedicated backhaul circuit and it was impossible to get the satellites set up and operating smoothly. I tried a smaller Orbi setup with the satellite that plugs into the wall but had problems with the satellite losing the connection to the router.
My renter's agreement does not allow me to make holes in the wall, and that still doesn't help me route cables through doors. Unfortunately I'm probably stuck with wireless :( Luckily 802.11ac is surprisingly effective, and I don't have much if any interference from neighbors where I live.
I have one in the upstairs and one downstairs. Both APs use the same SSIDs, which I believe is recommended. Haven't ever had in issue with it. When looking at the controller you can see which AP a client is connected to and when. It seems to transition in a few seconds of going up or downstairs. In fact, it work well enough that you can actually track who is upstairs and who is downstairs by which AP they are connected to.
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.
I've been an eero user for a year and a half and I've been very happy. Prior to the purchase my research indicated that Ubiquiti would have been a technically superior option but the setup/configuration looked far more daunting than the amount of time I wanted to dedicate to setting up my home wifi.
Eero just works but it's definitely very limited in configuration/control. Wifi reliability, coverage, and speed across the entire home (including fully encompassing the yard) is superb. The setup is absolutely amazing. You plug them in and you're done.
> Eero [...] has laid off 20 percent of its workforce (about 30 employees), TechCrunch has learned. Eero confirmed about 30 employees were let go but declined to comment on its total workforce size.
Since the workforce size can be inferred from this information (specifically, Eero seems to have gone from 150 to 120 employees approximately). Am I missing something, or why do they say Eero declined to comment on the workforce size? How did TechCrunch learn that those 30 employees represented 20% of the company workforce?
I've had both the Eero Gen 1 (3x Routers) and Eero Gen 2 (1x Router and 2x Beacons).
The Gen 2 is much better. Part of that is topology. I've got a long railroad-esque SF apartment. The beacons along the main hallway are unobtrusive and get great backhaul to the main router. They also function as nightlights, which is neat.
Hopefully they keep afloat and iterating the product. Having raised $90M you've got to wonder if they're betting a lot on growth of their SaaS "Eero Plus" product.
My experience with Eero - it works if you don't close door to the room where the main pod or wifi router is. If that room door is closed - the wifi connectivity is absyml or even absent. Is this expected behavior? Also, I think it need all pods in direct line of sight of each other - even if the pods are placed at distance and in different rooms/floors?
> My experience with Eero - it works if you don't close door to the room where the main pod or wifi router is. If that room door is closed - the wifi connectivity is absyml or even absent. Is this expected behavior?
Not expected unless your room is a faraday cage.
> Also, I think it need all pods in direct line of sight of each other - even if the pods are placed at distance and in different rooms/floors
Definitely doesn’t need line of sight. It’s just 2.4/5ghz WiFi transmission. The less stuff in the way, the better it will work, but you don’t need line of sight for typical homes. If your home is made of poured concrete and adobe, yeah, you might have trouble, but that’s going to be the case with any WiFi solution.
Eero works okay but the consistency is not great (wild variations in ping time, for instance). I switched to a Ubiquiti (Unifi) setup and it is a world of difference. My ping times are super stable (like < 1ms of standard deviation awesome) and that makes a big difference for any realtime demands.
My house is full of UniFi and I still had no idea that AmpliFi exists -- Ubiquiti's consumer-grade gear that's nowhere on their main website. It's well worth checking out for the tech novices in your life. (Great app-based setup for a WiFi router, mesh wifi, etc)
From the official statement: Over the past year we explored several related projects, and we’ve now made the tough decision to eliminate one new project in favor of greater focus on our core business.
Lol what? It's pretty well solved in office buildings. Why not just use the same thing in your home if you need it? Personally I've never lived in a house so bug it can't be covered well with a good AP and a repeater.
The last time I've checked, Mikrotik Wi-Fi wasn't great. It sporadically rebooted in crowded environments where you see like 50 Wi-Fi stations nearby.
It's an excellent router though. But the built-in Wi-Fi is pretty crude. That's why we had to turn it off and use Mikrotik exclusively as a WAN/LAN router in our office. The Wi-Fi part was delegated to AmpliFi HD mesh system.
