Amplifi Alien Wi-Fi 6 Router | Hacker News Reader

Amplifi Alien Wi-Fi 6 Router

amplifi.com

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It feels like ubnt tries to capture the audience of what airport extreme used to be - mesh networks, self-contained device, minimal config, telemetry and services lock-in. The same for unifi dream machine pro.

They are almost explicit that these devices are not for tech entusiasts, who used to be their largest customer base.

What telemetry do they gather, and why is it a big deal? (honestly asking). Simple duck/goog searches don't yield anything other than this [1], which seems innocuous.

[1] https://community.ui.com/questions/Update-UniFi-Phone-Home-P...

Does this mean that the unifi line is getting wifi 6 some time soon? I can’t really see why anyone who wants such a router would use amplifi now things like the Unifi dream machine exist (which are fantastic).

The Unifi machines don't pass the "mom" test. I would never give something that has anything like the Unifi management UI to my parents.

Out of curiosity, what network administraton tasks does your mom do?

None and this is exactly the point. If it has anything much more than "on" and "off" then it's not going to be accepted.

The point is that you can manage it remotely and they have exactly 0 buttons to push. They don’t have to manage anything at all.

This is absolutely the answer (my parents live close to us and even a no-button interface combo item results in more work than I want).

Amplifi is also going full remote support. If you're willing to log in with Facebook you can do it already.

One of the possible solutions if you want to pre-configure wifi APs for your parents, is to set the APs up for layer 3 management in advance. All an AP needs is:

1) default route out to the internet

2) ability to resolve DNS names

Then you can run your own unifi management controller somewhere offsite, like in a $4/month VM. The APs will find the controller by its hostname and talk to it over https/443.

But if you're just setting up wifi for your parents, how often do things need to be reconfigured? A unifi AP runs just fine with the absence of the controller, just no settings can be changed. If all they need is the wifi key and to put all their TVs, tablets, xboxes, whatever on the wifi, just give them the key, plug in the AP, and let it go.

If you need to reconfigure it in the future you can run a really small debian-stable VM with the controller inside virtualbox on your laptop.

I run a full UniFi network for some family members. 5 x APs, 7 x cameras and 2 x backhaul radios to connect buildings. They don't need to do anything as I can manage it all for them remotely. While this doesn't solve the "Mom" test it also allows them to not have to worry about anything. If something fails I just send them a new one that is already preconfigured. Couldn't be easier for them. I've been doing this for over 10 years now and have had one failure during that time. Things weren't as easy in the beginning but with the addition of UNMS and more features in UniFi I was able to remove the jump box (RPi) I had previously used to manage things that had been inaccessible without those new tools.

What is the use of the display on a Wi-Fi router? I did not touch mine since I have installed it and the next time I will touch it will be when I will replace it. It is as fire and forget as possible.

none. You'll look at it once, and then never again. It's not a good use of resources. Still, this is targeting the average user, so it looks cool.

For a good portion of the population understanding that this blinking light = powered on but not connected to the internet vs that blinking light = powered on and connected to the internet isn't particularly easy, but can still perform some basic levels of troubleshooting. Having a display to show those errors would be useful to them.

It's extremely useful when diagnosing problems that occur before you have managed to connect to the router.

I be a lot of people don't have an ethernet cable and a USB-ethernet adapter for the laptop lying around, so you have to connect via wifi. What if wifi isn't working? Very annoying.

It is quite useless after everything is set up though.

My parents have an Amplifi, and it's useful for them to issue the update (shows up on screen) - easy for the most part. They can also reboot the Amplifi without the plug/unplug.

I use ubiquiti stuff but I absolutely don't want to combine the functions of router and wifi. There is value in having the two things separated. I can make changes on the router without rebooting the APs, and vice versa. Or I can add additional APs hanging off the small managed Mikrotik switch that the router's LAN interface is connected to.

For up to about a 800 Mbps residential internet connection, the NAT and routing abilities of a $49 Edgerouter-X (model ER-X) are more than sufficient. If you have true symmetric gigabit service you'll probably be looking at one of the slightly larger edgerouter models. It runs an OS that is derived from Vyatta, you can ssh into it, it's a little embedded debian linux box inside.

The $79 Unifi AP AC Lite (802.11ac, dual band, 2x2 MIMO) is sufficient for my purposes. If I really wanted 3x3 and ac wave2 I suppose I could buy some $199 APs. But I really don't see the need just yet.

This thing looks like a slick consumer product which is designed to be more easy to use than the average HN reader needs. As competition for Google's home wifi gateway/router device, sure... I suppose it has its place.

Ok I'll sound like such an amateur, but that's one nice router. Probably the nicest one I've ever seen.

I hope it's a commercial success. Unifi/Amplifi makes good hardware.

Since you mention Unify,

I've come to absolutely despise the Unifi (from Ubiquity) wifi routers and avoids them at all cost, here's why:

In order to set them up, you need to download a terribly confusing software (the "Unify controller") that has never worked well on my mac os machines.

Said software then needs to "adopt" the wifi routers you want to configure. The configuration is then saved onto your computer (as opposed to "applied" to the wifi router).

This means, you can not easily manage your access points from any computer. You need to set up a permanent machine to host the configuration, or, you need to somehow move the configuration from computer to computer.

To add insult to injury, if like me you happen to loose the configuration files, "re-adopting" the access point will force you to take your router offline, which is less than amazing for an enterprise product that an entire office depends on to get work done.

Once you've gone through the hoops of download, installing, debugging the proprietary software, you have to deal with its utterly confusing UI.

I think unifi is meant to be managed via cloud/cloud key. They also have the dream machine which is an all in one for smaller deployments.

A few years back, they did not offer the cloud solution and only offered that "controller" software. I haven't tried their cloud solution, but it's in my opinion not ideal to depend on a cloud solution to configure my internet access.

That's what cloud key is for.

Your previous message used the present tense ("avoids") though.

Also it looks like their "cloud solution" is not really (public-)cloud based at all, it looks like a standalone piece of metal: https://unifi-protect.ui.com/cloud-key-gen2

unifi cloud is public cloud. Unifi cloud key is an on prem/hybrid version.

Haa, the nitpicks, let me be more explicit: through my past (and current, because I still own those routers) experience with Unify, I've come to avoiding them, because of [everything I explained].

I'm glad they offer an on-premise hardware turn-key solution (it wasn't available in the past).

Now, see my other commment[0]: I understand that my user experience might very well be due to Unify not being ideal for my use case.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589894

I had a terrible experience with the first version of the cloud key. Any time it lost power it would be corrupted and I had to go through the whole ordeal to restore a backup and re-adopt all the APs. A new version of the cloud key is out with a battery, so that would seem to solve the problem. However, like all unifi hardware, it's not cheap.

My current solution, which I am very happy with, is running the controller software in a Docker container on a $5/month vps. It's lightweight enough that it does not use enough resources to affect the other things I had on the vps.

They don't require a controller, though - I have a Unifi AP at home, it can be managed from an app on my phone, zero setup needed. But having a controller means being able to push configuration changes to multiple devices at once etc. (which I don't need in a small house, but would be handy in an office). I also have a Mikrotik router, which is not 'friendly' compared to consumer routers, but can certainly do a lot more.

The intent is that you'll host their software somewhere on your network as a service, rather than running it from your laptop. They have cloud-based offerings or dedicated management hardware you can also use if you don't have a system to run UniFi on.

These are managed devices and you can't really approach them as you'd approach a traditional standalone AP or router.

Respectfully, if you are having technical difficulty installing or maintaining the Unifi controller software on something like a very basic LAMP stack debian or centos virtual machine, Unifi is not the product line for you. You should go with something like Meraki.

It's not really a technical difficulty, aside from the fact that the unifi controller works really badly on macos. (also, I specialize in infrastructure, so the LAMP stack isn't an issue)

I just find it impracticable to have to maintain a dedicated machine (or VM, or whatever it is) just to configure those routers.

Now, however, I realize that this is because my current office only has about 4 of those and we're a 70 people company. I imagine it starts making a lot more sense once you start handling a few dozen of wifi routers.

So I guess the overhead of using Unifi at a small company might not be worth it, but, passed a certain amount of routers I can understand the overhead is lessened.

I thought WiFi 6 mandated use of WPA3? According to the specs this only supports WPA2 which means either WiFi 6 is not implemented properly or the listed specs are incorrect.

Indeed WPA3 is required for "Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6" only, but Ubiquiti already stated in a post that they are working on WPA3, even offering it as a software upgrade for many of their older models:

https://community.ui.com/questions/WPA3-for-existing-Unifi-f...

Do you have to buy multiple of these to have a mesh, or can you use one as a central node that can be extended with other routers?

I think they only mesh with themselves so you can't use another router and have it mesh with these ones.

You are probably able to mesh with other Amplifi models though.

That's the first time I've seen one of those weird "evolved" antennas in a consumer device. Scroll down the page to see it.

I'm not sure it's actually an evolved antenna or not. It could just be a very dense dual band antenna array weirdly outlined by marketing.

Sigh. I have a NAS that saturates a single gigabit link pretty easily. If only they included at least one 10GbE (or even just 5GbE) port...

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