TLDR: Ubiquity equipment is really good if you have possibly been worried about it being hard to setup. The opposite is true and they have a really nice phone app, and it provides the best mesh networking experience I’ve tried out of about 3 or 4 different things.
Previously I wrote about how I was doing pretty well with an ASUS Router that had 47 different antennas on it. Unfortunately, this wasn’t quite true - I was getting somewhat slow WiFi in my office and had a dead spot in my movie room.
I decided to try out Ubiquity’s Unifi equipment and bought the following:
A Cloud Gateway Ultra
Two Access Point U7 Pro Walls with Stands
Two Switch Lite 8 POEs
In all, I would say someone with some kind of computer science/engineering background can easily set one of these up, otherwise it’s slightly more complicated in some ways than a typical router - and in some ways slightly easier.
A few gotchas are that they basically don’t come with any instructions. The Cloud Gateway Ultra is discovered by being plugged into an active public internet after installing the Unifi app - though Ubiquity has quite a ton of apps and you have to know which one to install.
From there, it’s pretty good. At one point it sent me a multi-factor-authentication message and when switching out of the app the on-screen phone keyboard disappeared, and I had to know to check for the email on a different device to get around the bug. I haven’t seen any other bugs other than that sometimes it is hard to click on a particular device in the topology view, though this is not a problem because the list view still exists.
Mesh networking with the U7’s works great, though I have no experience with any other equipment. It works by defining the WiFi network first, rather than configuring each device, and the whole mesh experience is worlds improved than trying to mesh a second ASUS which I had returned.
The U7 stand is also really nicely made (it reminds me of the scam that is the Apple Pro Monitor stand for $999, but it’s about $40), though it does have this weird metal key you need to use to snap it back off the stand once you put it on, which means it’s not easy to disconnect the WiFi cable without the weird metal key.
There have been some seeming reports of IoT problems online, which I’ve only really seen one - two of my outdoor security cameras didn’t really want to reconnect (but can also be replaced and weren’t too great anyway). My Sonos system seems to work fine, though I did have to reboot every single speaker when replacing the access point.
All of the telemetry and information in the app is absolutely excellent and a tremendous improvement over any configuration app I’ve seen. It’s very easy to see device connectivity stats, signal strength, and so on.
One catch for new buyers is the U7 equipment requires PoE (power over ethernet) for power, but the cloud gateway, while it does contain a four port switch, does not supply PoE. I read online a bit you need to possibly be careful and not use non-Ubiquity equipment to supply power, but I’m not sure of parameters of that.
Since the Cloud Gateway didn’t supply power to the access point, I ended up using one of the switches I bought to put in a place different than I wanted, but it all worked out. Coverage is pretty good, with essentially the downstairs WiFi access point being towards the center of everything now and not having to be right next to my internet connection due to it being combined with the router.
While I definitely have to live with it for a while to have stronger opinions, I’m completely impressed and this is the way things should be. There’s also a bit of a toy factor. I have one dumb switch in the middle of things that I’m likely going to replace just to get more dashboard information, just because it’s fun to look at.
The U7’s range isn’t super large, but it’s good enough with two. I technically could add another AP but it doesn’t look like I need to and that might cause a bit more conflicts. There are some areas of the house where I’m getting less strength but it’s more than reasonable. Sometimes the iPhone can move to a room and be down at 50 mbps for a while before it roams some 30 seconds later, which is also not really a problem.