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.
I hope it's a commercial success. Unifi/Amplifi makes good hardware.
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.
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
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.
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.
These are managed devices and you can't really approach them as you'd approach a traditional standalone AP or router.
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.