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Comment by anderiv | Hacker News Reader

For the cost, I'd agree that Ubnt gear is quite good. I use it at home, and rarely have any problems.

That said, I'd like to provide one caveat: In my experience, they tend to not do great in very noisy RF environments. Twice now I've deployed Unifi APs in offices with RF spectra similar to what the OP has going on, and we had nothing but problems. In each case, we ripped out the Ubnt gear, replaced with equivalent Ruckus APs (with their cloud controller) and haven't had a single problem.

I admit this is not a large sample size, but thought it worth mentioning.

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I've had similar issues with Ubiquiti in a noisy RF environment. The 2.4GHz spectrum was extremely saturated and people were frequently dropped whenever they were on it. Thankfully, the neighbors aren't using 5GHz too much--I just turned off 2.4GHz for our own WiFi and it seems to have solved the issue. Still, very annoying and took a long time to figure out.

Yes, we actually considered that. Unfortunately in our use case, there were many 2.4GHz-only IOT-type devices that needed to be on the network, so we couldn't turn off 2.4GHz. It helped a bit when we turned down the 2.4GHz Tx power - that seemed to encourage more devices to jump over to 6GHz, but even that didn't solve the problems altogether.

I'm not an RF design engineer, but for this type of equipment, I do feel like there's some truth to "you get what you pay for". It's plain to me that the Ruckus APs have superior RF front-ends that are better able to deal with the noise. They're more expensive than Ubnt for sure, but that extra cost was very much worth it for us, to avoid the frequent disconnects that the users were having to deal with.

I found vastly more expensive Meraki APs to deal with noise way worse than Ubiquiti (but that's all I've used so I can't compare to others).

I have seen the exact same thing, 2.4Ghz runs a little overpowered, causing interference. Turn it down a little, doesnt need to be off.

As a counterpoint, we run Ubiquiti gear at large conferences (NAB in Vegas, IBC in Amsterdam). Thousands of people, hundreds of WiFi networks - pretty much a nightmare.

At NAB we're often the only booth with functional WiFi. Not using anything special really, just well configured UniFi mesh APs.

We went also from Unifi APs indoor gear to Ruckus gear. The difference is like night and day. I don't understand why, but we never had luck with the Unifis or Ubnt indoor. The Ruckus units we deployed just work brilliantly from the beginning.

My company do a lot of Ruckus deployments and they are brilliant, they have a radio built in just for spectrum analysis so each point can choose the perfect channel, none of this manual setting stuff.

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