Comment by xoa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xoa | Hacker News Reader

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L3 hosting and UniFi is now unfortunately just one of the many, many areas where it feels like Ubiquiti just kind of quit on it many years ago. It's really unfortunate but I've really gotten that sinking feeling about the platform for the last year or two now, with their killing of the forums and no replacement/upgrade for the bug/feature tracking part being the final straw. But overall they seem to show a lot of the classic signs of basic internal dysfunction, tons of effort expended on surface gloss and re-skinning things over and over again (yet then failing to even quickly bring feature parity up), lots of basic features and even merely keeping internal components up to date disregarded, ever increasing technical debt in the hardware line due to failure to update and replace now ancient kit (which instead they still sell new at full price). Something is going to have to give at some point. Unfortunately I don't see anything else in the same position either. It's such a depressing waste of potential.

"Something is going to have to give at some point."

Former Ubiquiti employee here.

The CEO is insanely toxic. Insulting people in the company Slack, publicly firing people on the spot, constantly trying to micromanage everything, shutting down entire offices without warning. It's crazy.

So much wasted potential. Most of the good employees left or were fired while i was there. Projects were changed or cancelled monthly. No one knew what was going on.

Robert Pera throwing the mFI team under the bus was super classy. Worst. EOL. EVER.

https://community.ui.com/questions/is-MFI-dead/2b4211ee-98c1...

UDM and Protect are shining examples of "never rewrite your product from scratch." USG XG was an unmitigated disaster. Dropping controller support for Broadcom-based APs was ridiculous. All seem to be technical debt driven decisions.

Holy. Shit.

If I were to pick the single best indicator of a terrible leader, it would be blaming subordinates for things they are resonspible for. Even if it is 100% the teams fault, the manager is, you know, suppossed to manage them away from such failure.

No organization with such a CEO can survive. We sell unifis at work and I have some in my home, but I will look elsewhere now.

Late, but thank you for sharing that. I participated and enjoyed the old community a lot, and was a big proponent of UBNT gear for many years. Seeing the downward spiral commence from the outside has been a real downer and I wondered what was going on internally. I figured it had to be something at the management level, but I'm bummed to have it confirmed nonetheless. Appreciate all the hard work you folks put in over the years, it was fantastic kit and a really promising overall solution. I wish there was something comparable, or that maybe Robert Para would finally step down/get pushed out.

I finally switched to UniFi equipment after hearing for years how much better it is than consumer WiFi equipment.

Oh man, what a headache.

Depending how one configured things, there’s at least 3 ways to provision devices - all 3 incompatible and will cause issues with each other. User manuals refer to Apps no longer in existence. In no instance have I had a “just works” experience. In two instances the option I needed to configure was not available through any of the 3 (4?) dashboards and I had to resort to sshing into the device.

4 weeks later I’m still experiencing ISP fiber modem disconnect issues every 48 hours and can not connect remotely to debug. The impression I get is 90% of the performance “gains” one gets from switching from Asus to Ubiquiti come from dedicating one $300 piece of hardware (which overheats) for each network function (firewall, switch, router, AP) rather than using a single threaded all-in-one device. Then people still bolt on accessory devices like pi-holes when a USG should be perfectly capable of performing the task.

The provisioning was a PITA and I only use the WiFi access point, not their router, but at least for me the WiFi reliability and signal quality is night-and-day compared to my "old" (2015/6-era) TP-Link Archer C7 router/WAP. I'm not sure what design details lead to this -- poking around via SSH, they're just running Linux with hostapd controlling Atheros interfaces (perhaps just solid engineering on antennas plus choosing a well-supported WiFi chipset?) -- but qualitatively there is definitely a difference in my experience!

I'm not a big fan of their Ubiquiti Device Discovery Tool, I always recommend using SSH method for adoption which is very reliable: https://support.hostifi.net/en/articles/3044211-unifi-cloud-...

They have a UDM and UDM-Pro in early acces that handles the all-in-one device scenario you mentioned.

I'm not sure if this all-in-one game is going to work. IMO, Unifi's hardware apart from their Wireless offerings is limited compared to other players in a similar price range. They should stick to what they're best at, which for me is their Wireless range and build around that.

In our case, we ended up using Mikrotik devices for our physical layers and Unifi as our APs. So far, the performance of the Wifi devices is excellent (though tuning high density configs was a bit of a pain), and the Mikrotiks give us exceptional control over the behaviour of the network topology.

Playing to the strengths of each vendor was the way to go for us. Worked out way cheaper as well.

They're definitely ignoring a big part of their market that made them successful initially.

Do you think there's a potential for disruption in this market?

>Do you think there's a potential for disruption in this market?

Yes absolutely, and UniFi itself provides a template and easy window because the hardware is now so dated. A similar management system but properly extended with solid certificate management and support, nice RADIUS, better L3/L2 (L3 master, L2 hardware fallback), friendly VLAN, gateway device that can actually handle stuff like Pihole, friendly WireGuard backing and usage, and hardware in general that moves forward towards >1G would be very interesting to a lot of people currently on UniFi but beginning to feel the winds of obsolescence blowing. Specific selling point of zero-cloud tie-in (beyond if you yourself want to run it on a cloud service), controller in container or VM standard. Have something (like algo and many others do) to generate mobile profiles, or offer hooks to MDMs or both for ease of deployment.

As far as I know there isn't really anything that does a nice job of putting all this stuff together, despite it arguably being something foundational that more and more people should be doing. Using Let's Encrypt, good automatic cert usage should be trivial. VLANs and VPN are something everyone with IOT should be thinking about. Etc. None of this is radical new technology, just quality implementations and a good GUI bringing together existing stuff, and with zero remote service reqs beyond the optional signing authority (and it should support just running your own root, let the appliance have a USB to make use of HSMs like a Yubikey too). I mean, I'd be delighted if there was no opening here because there is someone else already doing all this like UBNT was working towards too before the current state of affairs, but as far as I know there isn't. Higher end stuff in the market isn't that friendly, you need to be a real expert, the low end integrated stuff is the long standing shit show and/or a bunch of totally standalone components, and "smart" integrated stuff is all cloud sub.

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