Not a fan of Krebs but also not a critic. Litigation is expensive, and the purpose is to scare or bankrupt him, validity is irrelevant.
Will never use any product of this company.
Will never use any product of this company.
I've had enough bad experiences that i recently moved my routing/IDS to a dedicated box and am slowly moving away from their switches.
No reasonable replacements i've found for their APs yet though (Meraki is too expensive).
Personally I hate the way they're going towards cloud accounts and dedicated management boxes. We used to be able to just install a docker to manage everything but the latest hardware ranges (eg their video offering) require dedicated management hardware. They're also pretty slow with uptake on new standards like WiFi 6 and now 6E.
The ideal selling point of ubiquiti was self-managed near-enterprise quality hardware with free self-hosted management and decent hardware prices.
I can't fully blame them because I know venture capital idealises subscription pricing and data mining right now but it won't work for me and it's annoying having to look for another option again when I'm invested in their ecosystem.
But anyway it would be interesting to read more about what's going on behind the scenes.
If I'm faced with paying premium rates, I'm going with Cisco and premium vendors. Ubiquiti's value was good equipment at reasonable prices to the point that you could buy spares for reliability and save 90% of the cost of service contracts from premium vendors. That differential was the absolute wrong space for them to try to tap for more profit, because nothing else was special about the brand. Cheap, decent, "good enough" network gear is now a market available for exploitation, ubiquiti has lost it.
Exactly, well put.
For what it's worth, as I have been bitten by this practice of "gotchanomics" too many times that I've become a bit sensitive to any signs pointing to it.
I'm not 100% sure Unifi is doing this with their existing products, but new ranges like the video stuff require a modern management box which in turn requires a cloud account as far as I've heard. I've decided not to buy those for this reason. But it undermines my confidence in buying new gear for the ecosystem because it really feels like this will be the next step.
UI they have been slowly screwing up more and more for years (How many years are they into the "new UI" migration for the controller?).
But the actual switching is pretty basic stuff (and a separate hardware chip they are driving that is not hard to drive), and simply shouldn't be going wrong in this way.
I've also got a UDM-SE and UDM-Pro that seem to have hardware issues on the SFP+ uplink when connected in certain ways (and won't break 500mbps upstream) no matter what SFP+ module is connected (fiber, dac, etc) if the LAN SFP+ port is connected at 10gbps. All the same modules work in every other router (mikrotik, etc) connected the exact same way. (yes, before HN tries to debug this, IDS/etc is all turned off. There are no nft rules, no nothing, i have debugged this to death through the actual shell). Others have had the same issue.
They also have an $1800 ptz camera that can't follow objects even when it detects them (This is 100% basic functionality of a PTZ camera, especially at this pricepoint), despite promising it for years.
I have lots of these kinds of "why is basic functionality broken or missing" stories. Ubiquiti gets it out the door, says they'll fix it all in post, and moves on to the next thing.
They aren't a hardware manufacturer, they are a bad AAA game developer :)
My current favorite was the update to the AP Pro APs that broke everything if you were using a wireless uplink (I was using one to bridge a semi-decent signal to my garage). Clients connected to that AP had zero connectivity to anything else, despite the Controller saying "all good!"
Pera owns ~91% of the company, it all comes from the top.
I think it's still an okay value but you need to watch your flanks.
However, UniFi Protect is hardware only. You have to have either a UDM, a CloudKey Gen2 Plus, or a UNVR. I bought into Protect a couple years ago and now I'm sort of stuck with it. I _think_ that I could de-provision the cameras from my UNVR and use them standalone with BlueIris or Frigate but I've heard stories that they gimp the RTSP resolution on the G4 Pro camera (of which I have three).
I was thinking of a newer gateway as the USG is too slow to do decent IDS. And the video for my home.. But I didn't buy either for this reason. I looked at it about 2 years ago.
It feels like they want to do the same with the older network gear but they just won't because there will be too much backlash from the move.
Want your surveillance video to be cloud-hosted or on your own pre-existing RAID? Pound sand!
At home I'm happy with Google WiFi mesh all around my house.
Wasn’t sure where to look next… note taken on Aruba
After they bungled reporting the hacks last year, I promised to never purchase anything from Ubiquiti again. Good to know Aruba may be an option.
TP-Link Omada is a very similar system like UniFi in this price range. Their Controller GUI almost looks the same as UniFi‘s.
One thing i have that often limits my choices is that the ubiquiti's are recessed into my ceiling (6 AP's). I can do the drywall work, if they make the mounts :)
If I have to, I guess i can make some from scratch in solidworks, but i'd rather not.
I do like their WAPs. I've got a couple of RS510 WAPs that do a great job, but initially they had some noticeable performance problems for almost a year until fixed by a firmware update.
Anything I should keep in mind before I get more of this brand?
Ruckus is my go-to for access points/ client Wi-Fi. (I manage 1000s of ruck) Excellent hardware. Every AP they offer can have it’s firmware flashed to either fully standalone, OR centralized manage (vSZ / ZoneDirector), OR unleashed (which is AP self-managed for up to 25 local aps). Another much overlook feature of ruckus is that every function can be controlled/modified via SSH. while not as powerful as a true API, it’s still very powerful and often very overlooked.
But i am very happy with the router. I have 5gbps symmetrical internet, and it's one of the few that can handle it for real without BS.
I bought their largest AP, the 660, attached it to a second floor ceiling, and found it covered my whole home and much of the yard. It supports 100s of clients.
(I reworked our home network to Omada gear last fall. OC200, ER605, a few managed switches, couple of EAP245 APs. Overall quite happy with it; as the person above said it's pretty much fire and forget once you get the initial setup done. Used to use -- and enjoyed -- Mikrotik but alas their wifi support/performance at least on the home front has stagnated over the past several years.)
The only thing I regret of theirs is the router (TL-R605). It’s not bad, but the VPN performance is mediocre, and I always wonder if I would’ve been happier with pfsense. Every other piece of hardware has been great.
I manage them with an app on a tablet connected to the same LAN, I've disabled all cloud management. That said, they are almost configure and forget, after the initial install I've only had to upgrade the firmware when I visit the site.