Hacker News Reader

Comment by glsdfgkjsklfj | Hacker News Reader

to be honest, any moderm AP will do the job. processing power increased by a lot recently and the spec is mostly just narrowing down what enterprise gear used to do for years as an "extra". e.g. wifi6 (ax) is just officializing beam forming that every premium ap had since wifi-n but was not part of the spec.

praising unifi you are just suffering from new-shiny-toy-syndrome. Specially because your unifi AP is the only (few?) product on the market that requires a second appliance to work (and don't even get me started on running the controller on a vm with outdated dependencies, out of sync open source code, and broken mongoDB implementation) to not have more than half of the advertised features disabled (e.g. vlans, guest, etc)

View on HN

> praising unifi you are just suffering from new-shiny-toy-syndrome

I was responsible for a small office, and I tried a bunch of different big-brand expensive prosumer APs, and they all had troubles.

I then tried Unifi gear, which wasn’t as easy to set up, but it worked flawlessly and has done so for years. I’ve since used a few different Ubiquiti products in a few other situations and the gear has just run solidly with zero trouble.

I have used other reliable gear: the Apple Airport was great but now discontinued, every Fritzbox I have dealt with has been fine, and I currently have a Mikrotic at home which has been reliable (albeit in a very undemanding environment). I am about to add a outdoors Ubiquiti AP at home.

Maybe gear is more reliable now, but I recommend Ubiquiti to friends and it hasn’t let me down yet.

Which AP are you looking at for the outdoors ?

Mikrotiks are good, and they are cheap, but they are very hands-on in setup, you have to know what are you doing.

I have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing, but still find Mikotik confusing and hard to set up for non-trivial use cases. Like configuring an SSID per VLAN.

Unifi APs being bridges only is a feature, not a bug. There's a wide range of all-in-one devices on the market; pure AP bridges, not so much.

And before you say, that you can configure all-in-one to work in bridge mode: yes, some of them. Many of them cannot, or have weird limitations when you do.

> Unifi APs being bridges only is a feature, not a bug

I think OP means that you have to be running Unifi somewhere in order to get all the features from the AP. Not that it's just an access point and requires a separate router (which I agree, is a huge plus).

Strictly speaking you don't need to run the controller. The Android app can configure APs in standalone mode and update their firmware.

He wrote "some features", not to run the APs in general.

You don't need controller per se to get per-user VLAN assignment or WPA Enterprise. What you need is running RADIUS server somewhere, and controller conveniently provides a basic one (it has FreeRadius underneath, but provides only basic configuration options, so you won't be able to use AD for your users; also do not edit the config manually, any update will wipe your edits).

For guest portal, you need, well, guest portal somewhere. The guest portal is a part of the controller. However, if you need guest portal, I don't see any problem running controller somewhere.

For the rest, you can also run controller on your computer once, configure everything and then shutdown the controller. All the devices will work fine without it.

Edit: word

you are correct. can't expect unifi fanboys to pass a reading comprehension test.

for the record, most other industry that offer APs that run on standalone will work with all features, or only advertise that feature on the package. For example, you don't see cisco(?) unleashed mode APs advertising guest portal, unless they can do it on unleashed (stand alone) mode.

Unifi is intentionally misleading.

Don't worry about that; even the biggest unifi fanboy will turn back into normalcy once they will have to contact the ubiquiti support (yeah, ubiquiti support, that's oxymoron).

I don't know about that. I use the second generation nest wifi and its struggling with the ~35 devices in my home.

well, google consumer products are not exactly know for being "premium" in anything.

How many of the mesh nodes do you have? I have three including the primary one, and have had as many as 50 devices on my network and it has worked flawlessly. Many are low bandwidth IoT devices/hubs, but I've literally never had any problems over three years.

About 30 of the devices are low bandwidth IOT devices, I have one hub and one node.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com