You can do the same with Mikrotik and a ton of configuration, the pitch with Unify is that it "just works".

* Dream Router 5G Max: The Fully Integrated UniFi Experience *

Did you know there is an entire post category for ads and self-promotion? https://news.ycombinator.com/show

The only industry that talks in bytes/s is parts of the storage space, because they relate to files, that are measured in bytes/s. And even them use both: the data link is in bits/s (e.g. SATA 6 is 6Gbps, NVMe uses the same bits/s than PCIe (1)) while the drive is usually in bytes/s (µSD cards, NVMe SSDs, etc).

When you look at the industry at large, throughput is virtually always measured in bits/s. HDMI is in bits/s. Video codecs measures bitrates in bits/s. Audio codecs measures bitrates in bits/s. PCIe is in bits/s (1). Ethernet is measured in bits/s. Wifi is measured in bits/s. You get the picture.

The good thing about keeping it consistent is that values are relatable. Streaming services naturally talk in bitrate for the video quality, and your ISP also talks in bits/s. You can compare the two numbers. Bytes/s is only really useful for on the spot jobs that you do once, like transferring photos from an SD card to your computer. Otherwise, it's just a unit.

(1): ackhstually pcie measures speeds in transfers/s because they include the 8b10b/64b66b encoding overhead and TLP overhead but I digress.

A byte per second is no more intuitive than a nibble per second or a bit per second. You might be used to byte as a power user because of storage, but I assure you that to regular people “256 gigabytes” is a meaningless number as well.

Private 5G networks usually need internal eSIM cards, you can't just let public devices roam into the private 5G net.

Benefits of 5G over WiFi: much better roaming between APs, higher distances, and better congestion management if there are hundreds of devices connected to a cell.

What I did noticed is so many fast videos right next to text. I didn't even bother to read it (without firefox read mode) because it makes me a bit dizzy.

Contrast with:

(1) eero has no web UI (ONLY mobile phone!) and almost zero network configurability. You can't set a hostname for instance for DHCP. You can have exactly one main and one guest network. You don't get to configure anything about it though. Etc.

(3) I bought a Linksys replacement for my Eeros to get 6E -- I returned it to the store due to how horrifyingly bad the Web UI was and how bad the "app" was too. AND it also had flaws like inability to have reservation IPs outside the DHCP pool range.

Apple is actually the opposite of Ubiquiti -- they don't want you to be able to configure anything or have any visibility into anything. It either 'just works' or just silently fails or fails with "An error occurred."

Ubiquiti is one of the few companies doing prosumer hardware - and doing it extremely well. They give you access to advanced, raw configurations without necessarily having to go "full enterprise" deployment. They also have solutions for just about everything.

That being said, I generally have moved towards other Wifi solutions as I've grown weary of tweaking Ubiquiti all of the time. I found that I could get better top-end performance out of Ubiquiti gear, but really struggled to hammer out poor performance in edge cases. Particularly, with jitter and random latency spikes.

My consumer mesh wifi system gets nowhere near it's advertised performance, with little way for me to tweak it. However, I rarely need "full performance" and it doesn't suffer from the same random glitches.

At the same time I would never recommend anyone get 5G internet as their primary service if you have other options and especially not from one of these cheap providers.

[1] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/

[2] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/vyos-router-update/#wan-f...

The problem with this setup for me is that it doesn't work with uplink that sometimes becomes unstable yet nominally working, and in general LTE fallback triggers slowly.

Are there any prosumer-friendly options for connection bundling, which can balance uplinks continuously?

I have a T-Mobile backup home internet plan, and when I had a rack set up, it was my failover from fiber. The Dream Machine Pro did auto failover and failback flawlessly. However, I recently moved, and am redoing my homelab so I have no rack right now; internet is from a Dream Router, so I don’t have auto-failover. I doubt I’d buy this for the small window of time I expect to be in this situation, but if you didn’t have or want a rack, an AIO with failover would be great.

I have a network cable from my secondary WAN port on my dream machine running to my first story roof where there’s a wall mount ready for starlink to be plopped in.

Seems an odd omission for a ruggedised outside modem - the Unifi also seems to not support external antennae.

(I'd also prefer a unifi version just so it fits in the with rest of the networking infra I have in the mökki.)

Enterprises? Thousands, tens of thousands of employees? Generally cost isn't prohibitive at the scale so bigger ecosystems with more support make way more sense. Even their enterprise switches aren't really equivalent to Cisco, Arista, Juniper, etc enterprise offerings. They're inching forward, though.

If you are in a situation you need multiple wireless APs but can't run ethernet to them (like renting etc), I'd probably pass on a Unifi system personally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

https://www.historytools.org/docs/reasons-to-avoid-amazon-ee...

I use both mikrotik and ubiquiti at home. The mikrotik is necessary for a few things the ubiquiti can't do, but mostly it's a wash.

Incidentally mikrotik tends to be behind ubiquiti for rolling out new wifi stuff

  Ubiquiti at home because it is light years better than any consumer brand

I now exclusively use open-source projects with a strong history and community - or used high-end enterprise gear that I pick up when it reaches EOL so it's dirt cheap. Stability has been so much better, even with the most advanced configs I ever created.

I'm looking forward to getting more Unifi gear in the near future.

They were founded by some people that left Apple.

This product is aimed at those people who want something nicer than the 5g router bundled with their plan.

5G in my city is 650 Mbps and is honestly cheaper than fiber, but my fiber has better jitter (and can go up to 2 Gbps). For a lot of people, 5G would be more cost effective.

True, however before I was running a UniFi household I did quite enjoy Apple's Airport equipment. Back in the day it felt like they were the first time I had consumer networking equipment that I wasn't forced to reboot regularly to resolve issues.

This is unprecedented and much appreciated.

Another example, I had Frigate set up on a home rolled NAS. Again, it worked alright, but it always stole time from me. It always needed a little maintenance or tweaking or thinking. I bought a UNVR and modern Unifi cameras. Adopted, zero thinking or management from me. I still retain control of my data and it respects my privacy. It isn't perfect, but at the price point it solved meaningful problems I cared about in both cases. Yes they are commercial products and not open source, but they are priced reasonably to my eyes (the UCG ultra was actually cheaper than the netgate). That makes me a happy customer.

I have run their wifi APs for over a decade with no problems. It's not perfect, I know there are still privacy concerns. No company is really perfect, but they are good to me.

Their wired stuff is a total scam since Edgerouter fell off, though. The same functionality exists on a $50 netgear managed switch (or wired router, etc.), and the shitty unified configuration interface doesn’t justify the markup at all.

Why did AVM or Netgear Orbi not get this treatment for "works", though?

So, implying that Unifi is the only company that does this in an easy way is misleading marketing.

Comparing against Mikrotik is a very low bar.

I would guess they are chinese...

Meanwhile, Apple still hasn't fixed bugs that I reported to them between 2012 and 2014 while working for one of the largest universities in North America as a level 2 tech.

Sure some of their hardware is overpriced, but they're pushing the limits of what's available in the 10 and 25 Gbe areas at relatively reasonable prices.

Unifi is great for small IT companies providing network services to tens of costumers. Being able to manage everything remotely (and even batch things for all of your customers) is great.

I need to figure out if the 5G box can be powered like that too

In August they changed their plans so you’d need to cancel and re-subscribe.

I wish there were cheaper 10gb switch from Ubiquiti. The link Agg is good, but still pricey.

I discovered the same thing the hard way myself recently (in Norway); turns out that cell towers only has enough battery for ~24-36 hours (if you're lucky).

However, someone messing with the fibre to my house is a bigger possibility than power outage, so I'll probably end up with this 5G product. :)

Edit 2: I have eero now. The nodes seem to have some proprietary protocol that sends clients to the best node as you walk around the house. I can’t setup Vlans or do power user stuff, but my WiFi actually “just works” now. I don’t think I’ve touched it once after initial setup.

    media.autoplay.blocking_policy
    media.autoplay.default

The point I'm trying make is that there is more nuance than a simple HN user stereotype.

They have tried to go subscription based licensing but that can be conflicting for companies who just want decent reliable network gear in all the above market segments.

I fit in the prosumer category and have about $10,000 in gear and while it's great for my needs I don't see myself ever spending money for network gear subscriptions.

Meanwhile, the quality of their competitors’ tools for managing multiple switches without manually configuring each one, individually, over SSH or via a graphical tool is not necessarily amazing.

For example, it’s been a while since I used Ruckus Unleashed (the low-end management tool from an very upmarket vendor), but I think UniFi Network (the management tool) is a good amount better than Unleashed.

I really wish the people who put so much effort into software like OpenWRT would put some of that effort into managing multiple devices in a nice, unified manner. The tooling could be so much better.

Au contraire!

I got tired of the refrain "are you messing with the network again?" in the evenings when the neighbors are all streaming Netflix and crowding the airwaves, so I installed several low power UI APs around the house and and popped my own DNS and devices to a separate VLAN.

No more complaints :)

I do wish Unifi offered more configuration in the ad-blocking department, but I'm hesitant to inflict anything but the most vanilla deployment on the remainder of the household..

Ubiquiti 5 port managed switch: $30 https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-switching/products/u...

Netgear 24 port managed switch: $260 (with a 1 year subscription included!) https://www.netgear.com/business/wired/switches/smart-cloud/...

Ubiquiti 24 port managed switch: $225 https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-switching/products/u...

Sorry, but what markup are you referring to?

I'm sure you can find price differences at different products & tiers, but quickly glancing around it sure doesn't look like Ubiquiti has any particular premium markup.

Regardless having a self-hosted, buy-it-and-own-it, non-business friendly product line absolutely has value. I loved my mikrotik switches when I was just messing around, but the single pane of glass, central management is not insignificant when time becomes a more precious resource and you just need it to work.

Unifi is used by the tech-savvy homeowner that needs PoE for their security cameras and wants to control and configure their network without needing a network engineer.

I know some people running independent community fiber ISPs. Digging trenches can be a nightmare depending on the neighbourhood. You can have property ownership issues, other utilities being present, permit nightmares, different ground/soil types, etc. That ignores the fact that when somebody else digs they can hit your lines and repairing that is a pain.

Digging is better, though. But it’s not necessarily as easy as one may think.

If you mean the standard routers (like the Rutx50), Teltonika itself sells external enclosures with antennas. https://www.teltonika-networks.com/products/accessories/ante...

When he was with a larger company, cisco and juniper were the only options.

Actually, it seems one of the advantages of the new Ubiquiti devices over Teltonika/Mikrotik/Gl.iNet is that they actually have 10 Gbps SFP+ and 2.5 Gbps ethernet ports.

> For tougher environments or deployments with poor indoor cellular coverage, the outdoor model maintains the same high performance cellular connectivity with improved antenna performance in a durable IP67 rated enclosure. It is built for rooftop installs, off site locations, and mobile deployments where reliability is critical. Just like its indoor counterpart, you can also connect it via any PoE port, anywhere on your network, greatly simplifying cabling requirements.

And the first image they show of the outdoor model is it installed in a fixed location on a rooftop.

Portability and heat. You can get a small USB 2.5G adapter that produces negligible heat, but a Thunderbolt 10G adapter is large and produces a substantial amount of heat.

I use 10G at home, but the adapter I throw into my laptop bag is a tiny 2.5G adapter.

For 5Gbps and higher, you'll need another PCIE line - and SOHO motherboards are usually already pretty tight on PCIE lanes.

10GbE will require 4x3.0 lanes

That said, I have some concerns that the OpenWRT AP firmware is not as optimized as the Unifi firmware is for that specific hardware. Mostly for wireless performance, but I also don’t want to hit some weird CPU bottleneck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pera

There is OpenWISP: Leveraging Linux OpenWrt, OpenWISP is an open-source solution for efficient IT network deployment, monitoring & management.

There is now also TP-Link's Omada line at least which seems like the most comparable alternative.

Where I work just acquired new property and are deploying a new site. It took 9 months, from date of first contact, before the ISP could come out, bore under the road, and run fiber to our building from two poles away. And that's just a short ~500 feet underground run.

I couldn't imagine the amount of permitting and logistics involved in trying to bury an entire run across town.

Overall, it's much nicer. No ugly telephone poles, don't have to worry about weather, just reliable, strong service. But to think it pays for itself in 2 years is laughable.

Initially I thought this is going to be a huge pain. I have many interfaces and also pass-through hardware like the SFP28 card. I made a copy of my primary router vm and added fake interfaces with the same MAC addresses. I then went through the update procedure which was very simple.

in vyos vm:

  wget https://community-downloads.vyos.dev/stream/1.5-stream-2025-Q2/vyos-1.5-stream-2025-Q2-generic-amd64.iso -o vyos-1.5-stream-2025-Q2.iso
  add system image /mnt/iso/vyos-1.5-stream-2025-Q2.iso
  # follow prompts
  reboot
  # boot screen will offer two version now, old and new

You do loose any custom configs you may have. In my case it was fstab changes and my cron entries.

I adore VyOS

Edit: The SIMPoYo eSIM Physical Card (see https://www.gl-inet.com/campaign/simpoyo-cards/ ) seems really cool, may even be nice for a phone.

But I might pick up an R720 just to play with -- that's a different echelon of gear.

Thanks for the tip.

https://youtu.be/IStbaTQTBio?t=117

Aside from noise it's also not ideal for reliability in dusty environments.

Interesting fact that EdgeOS from Unifi was a fork.

I do wish they were even smaller (I've got one location I'd like to mount one inside a wall box, which is admittedly pretty niche), and I am never again touching UI's configuration software (even 10 years later I feel that wound), but, yeah... love these little guys.

https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/internet-solutions/colle...

1. Eero - great performance, no web config (only mobile app), cloud dependent, half the features paywalled for monthly subscription (eyeroll)

2. Linksys - confirmed piles of crap, a 6E mesh kit I tried last year performed worse than my 2018 Eeros so why bother. Config is even more limiting than Eero, the web UI is a slow disaster that times out constantly, and the app is terrible and the features are badly designed.

3. Netgear - sucks as parent comment explains

4. TP-Link - reputation is that it's bad but I haven't tried

5. Asus - never tried

6. Google - no doubt they'll kill and brick these at some point

Any others I'm forgetting?

Interesting option.

Seems weird to cripple the product by not allowing me to (optionally) disable the internal antenna and instead use and tune an external antenna. And I suspect that is likely to make a difference when you are on the edge of coverage, but you know exactly where the relevant cell tower is, a few km away.

I just checked and my new Wifi 7 APs don't run Debian though, they...

    admin@BedroomAP:~# cat /etc/os-release
    NAME="OpenWrt"
    VERSION="23.05-SNAPSHOT"
    ID="openwrt"
    ID_LIKE="lede openwrt"
    PRETTY_NAME="OpenWrt 23.05-SNAPSHOT"
    VERSION_ID="23.05-snapshot"
    ....

    OpenBSD 7.7 (GENERIC) #339: Sun Apr 13 17:52:27 MDT 2025
        deraadt@octeon.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/octeon/compile/GENERIC
    real mem = 536870912 (512MB)
    avail mem = 521142272 (497MB)

I would challenge you to try supporting your family using your home network doing esoteric things, the juice is not worth the squeeze. I can give my wife the UniFi login and she can figure things out well enough on her own, and it lets us easily integrated networked devices that don't serve network connectivity (e.g. IP cameras) into our day-to-day as well.

Do I think UniFi is bar none the best gear? Absolutely not. Do I think it's a "good deal"? Maybe. Do I think it's better than the alternative uses of my time, that I'd rather spend doing other stuff? Abso-fucking-lutely, which is why I have been buying it for years.

>Built for rooftops, remote sites, and vehicle based setups

They are insinuating if you actually read their press release then you would not state it was targeted only at stationary deployments.

Based on the spec sheet 2 out of its 6 antennas are directional, this is probably a 4x4 modem so it must have some way to switch 2 antenna from directional to omni.

There's of course fiber too...

3.0 PCIE is irrelevant today when it comes to devices you want on 10G. I'm pretty sure the real reason is that 2.5G can comfortably run on cable you used for 1G[1], while 10G get silly hot or requires transceiver and user understanding of a hundred 2-3 letter acronyms.

Combine it with IPS speeds lagging behind. 2.5G while feels odd to some, makes total sense on consumer market.

[1]: at short distances, I had replaced one run with shielded cable to get 2.5G, but it had POE, so it might contribute to noise?)

(But PCIe 3.0 of course is from 2010 and isn't too relevant today - 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 and 7.0 have 16/32/64/128 Gbps per lane respectively)

Have you looked at Mikrotik? They offer a more traditional autonomous OS w/o controllers and both a nice CLI and a powerful GUI tool.

802.11ax ("wifi 6") is as good as it gets, with [eg] their wAP AX.

They get a lot of stuff right, though. They run RouterOS, which is a custom userland for Linux that is intensely flexible. Approximately any routing-esque function a person can dream up that can work with a Linux kernel can be made to work within RouterOS.

The form factor of the wAP AC/AX boxes is really very nice -- they can blend well in on a wall (inside or outside), attached to a pipe, or whatever. I've got a wAP AC on the wall of my living room, for instance. I use another one when "camping" off-grid, zip-tied to the leg of an easy-up awning.

It's ostensibly just an access point, but it doesn't have to be. I mean, like: There's two ethernet ports, but they exist without a preconceived function. Want to use it as a router, with hardware WAN and LAN ports? How about with VLANs and a managed switch instead, so it works with just one cable? Eleventy-five different SSIDs? Bridging networks with wifi? Using station mode to leech bandwidth from the cafe across the street, and perform firewalling and NAT and VPN, so you can use it in your apartment -- with only one box? Sure, no problem. Whatever it is, it works.

Power is flexible. All of the bits to use passive POE are included; or it can just plug in with the included DC connector; or it can use proper 802.3af PoE.

I don't know how it compares to something from Ruckus, but I'm much more pleased with it than the Ubiquity gear that I am presently taking a break from fighting with.

Which is how I'm using mine actually, one less wall wart in the area I use them

I am cautiously optimistic that this means even if thousands of these devices suddenly "light up" in an outage, the infrastructure should be able to handle them, right? Thoughts?

I see tons of small businesses (mom & pop, restaurants) with a UI AP or two, of course, but that's not what you meant, I don't think.

The places that COULD use UI often just don't care, and want the cheap toilet paper (netgear, ebay whatever) since cost discipline can be critical. I think there's a niche of biz with enough margin that networking/cameras get sold together and they don't insist on lowest price. My guess would also be the MSP that is quoting the job also heavily influences whether UI is used, plenty of dinosaurs out there.

Bigger places want routing, network virtualization, etc from the big players you mentioned. UI doesn't want to mess with BGP, spine-leaf, sd access/wan, etc. There's also like the 24/7 support options they want, and access to the partner/VAR/contractor networks so you have tons of options. The sales deals and dinners unfortunately factor into this too...

I've done this using an android phone, usb-c hub w/ethernet nic, and and edgerouter lite before.

The biggest missing piece i see is the option for an external antenna.

If it’s fine if you want to build a golf cart, just don’t pretend it’s an ATV.

I knew it runs hot before I deployed it, but I wasn't aware that you have to wait for it to cooldown before unplugging, or you get burnt.

Unless you count hiring someone to do it for you.