I love these little guys. I was in the market for a WAP solution that will mesh. I didn't need anything beyond WAPs (no routing functionality required as I have an Ubiquiti Edgerouter-X for that) and I definitely didn't want anything that relied on outside servers to operate or use an app to control it (looking at you Google Wifi or similar).
What I like about these:
Very powerful feature set.
Stylish enough to have in the home without the wife being irritated
Excellent performance.
Set up initially and forget.
Very secure and frequently updated software.
What I don't like:
Having to install the controller software rather than access it via a self created web page (nature of the beast with this level of hardware though).
I have one of these wired into my switch using the provided PoE injector. The other is down a floor of our 2400 sq-ft condo and towards the other end of the building and it is only powered by the PoE injector (no wired uplink). It wirelessly connects to the first though meshing and the traffic is passed into my wired network that way. Performance has been excellent and these eliminated any slow spots around our entire home. Minimum performance is around 40mbps on 2.4GHz and upwards of 300mbps on the 5GHz band.
I like the guest network functionality and it works quite well even if you don't make any setting changes to your router. Previously I had created a guest network with a separate AP and firewall rules, but this removed that requirement. The ability to adjust power by band is nice as I set the 5GHz power higher than the 2.4GHz to encourage devices to use it instead (combined SSID).
I ended up installing the controller software on my Raspberry Pi which performs other network admin tasks for me already. To be clear, you do NOT need to run this software all the time nor do you need to create an Ubiquiti account. I opted to put it on my Raspberry Pi for the monitoring and logging capabilities. It gives me the level of control from my smartphone that other products offer without the need for external servers (I can even access it from outside my network since I VPN back to my house network anytime I am not at home).
These do take a little more setting up than the consumer level competitors, but if you are looking at this level hardware you should also know what is required to make it work. It's better than I expected, but still isn't a pop it out of the box and turn it on solution.
For my uses, these things are amazing. For less than competing products I have an excellent solution without all the potential security risks for features I don't need. Two are sufficing for my purposes, but I have no doubt a third would seamlessly integrate into my network if I needed it.
Thanks Ubiquiti!
| Wireless Type | 802.11a/b/g/n |
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