Ive been using them since gen1 hardware on 2.6 controllers. And their advertised features like zero handoff were hot garbage. Their channel selection to this day still sucks and isn’t even self aware. I often have multiple aps on the same channel close enough they have their own co-channel interference. This even happens on 5Ghz where theres plenty of space, not even considering DFS and I live in the country.
Standards like fast roaming are fraught with issues.
And at one point they added call homes/telemetry. I think the 5.x code.
That is to say they have always been buggy in one form or another. More so than other vendors like Aruba or Cisco, I’ve managed both at campus scale in a previous life. I wouldn’t put them in an enterprise but a smb or soho deployment sure.
When they did the call homes/telemetry I created some firewall rules for the controller. The controller can only talk to the Ubuntu repos. Aps are on a private vlan with no internet. I only open the controller up for Ubnt upgrades and then shut down the rules and disable the ubnt repos in sources.list.
If I were someone new in the market I would look at the ruckus unleashed platform for wifi. You can get aps with extensive features cheaper, especially grey market.
I would and have avoided UBNT for all routing and switching.
for wireless AP's? It really depends. I actually just went with Wave2 stuff. In the end i bought some UAP-AC-HD's because
1. I am familiar/setup to handle their quirks and had 99% of the setup already done.
2. I really wanted an AP with Dual 5Ghz AND dual 2.4 Ghz dedicated antennas for some very specific applications (multiple rtsp streams over wifi+client plex wifi streams+client traffic. With the first two largely being on 2.4Ghz.
3. I am lazy (lots of this, my wife is less tolerant of me re-designing the wheel and being locked into an upgrade for days)
4. The security stuff i had mostly addressed anyway.
If this were a greenfield purchase or I didn't really need/want dedicated radios.
Id go with a ruckus. the r700 unleashed and/or r500 unleashed can be found cheap and are chock full of features. and 2x2:2 is normally going to be perfectly fine in a home setting.
Going with ones that are "unleashed" mean that the controller runs on the AP's. not extra hardware needed.
For most home uses. wave1 is still more than enough and their Wave1 AP's can be had cheap. Hell you can probably even get one of the R710/R510's in a very good price range and be at wave2.
For switching...mikrotik is solid for cheap and works and stable. Even modems etc. For firewalls my preference is BSD, so something like opnsense...But mikrotik will probably do okay as well.
> Id go with a ruckus. the r700 unleashed and/or r500 unleashed
This is the problem with Ubiquiti, and maybe why they feel they can advertise in their UI and let their quality slip: a new r710 lists for $1295.
That's almost four times as much as a UAP-AC-HD. On sale for $810 it's still over twice as much. Some of the Ubiquiti WiFi 6 stuff can be had for $100-150.
Like, yeah, I'm sure Ruckus is way better, but I'd hope so for the price difference.
You can get the r710 on Amazon for $430. R510 are even cheaper around 230 or so. These aren’t the latest iterations of their hardware. Ruckus doesn’t require a contract to get updates firmware/software. Theses are around the same prices as a uap-ac-hd.
Regardless of list price. They can be had as cheap as ubiquiti and their software/firmware is not only better but doesn’t have all the telemetry crap built in.
No it is still new. Just not the latest line of production gear (Which would be the R750). Im not going to post direct links because i assume that's a no-no.
Ruckus refreshes their gear fairly frequently and the overstock can be had at a steep discount. Those not needing to do huge, high density deployments in things like auditoriums, stadiums, classrooms and the like but are just looking for something for their home can get a really solid piece of gear (imho better than ubnt) at a steep discount.
Its not really the same as even grey market Cisco stuff.
Like i said, i stuck with ubnt because of some specific things, including the fact that I could re-use mounting holes/measurements and could upgrade in an hour vs rebuilding entirely.
Thanks for the detailed information. Unfortunately, the UK prices don't reflect the US prices, both on Amazon UK and other retailers here. The only way to get Ruckus gear that cheap (or cheaper) is to get them used on eBay. I think I'll probably go down the TP-Link Omada route as someone suggested elsewhere in the comments here. The feature set and prices look to be about right for me.
Mikrotik has a great feature set and is mostly stable for the mainstream features. Where they really fall apart is wifi throughput. Most devices won't top 400mb/s.
There is some hope on the horizon with v7 and the newest devices like Audience. Have seen reports of 1.3gb/s on these. But it's barely even beta right now.
Ruckus is pretty solid and you can usually find them used for great prices. Many units have a stand alone firmware available that negates the need for a controller.
We used to operate a satellite office whose primary internet service was Mikrotik directional AP’s bridged at both ends and this was maybe a half mile line of sight uplink.
My testing even on gigabit chipsets mirrors your 400 mbit per AP comment, at least in my situation.
If you are talking long distances you need to start looking at directional antennas...But to say..span an A-Frame house...they would do fine as others as well.
You will need to have one AP wired (thats the root AP) and the next ones can be wireless connected/meshed.
Note: regardless of the vendor Meshing will basically 1/2 your available wireless bandwidth. Its handy to extend coverage, and you will still be able to stream netflix and probably even things like facetime etc, but you are going to be essentially inducing a half-duplex connection into your "backbone".
Standards like fast roaming are fraught with issues.
And at one point they added call homes/telemetry. I think the 5.x code.
That is to say they have always been buggy in one form or another. More so than other vendors like Aruba or Cisco, I’ve managed both at campus scale in a previous life. I wouldn’t put them in an enterprise but a smb or soho deployment sure.
When they did the call homes/telemetry I created some firewall rules for the controller. The controller can only talk to the Ubuntu repos. Aps are on a private vlan with no internet. I only open the controller up for Ubnt upgrades and then shut down the rules and disable the ubnt repos in sources.list.
If I were someone new in the market I would look at the ruckus unleashed platform for wifi. You can get aps with extensive features cheaper, especially grey market.
I would and have avoided UBNT for all routing and switching.