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Comment by smcleod | Hacker News Reader

Weird that the ethernet ports are only 1GbE, that discounts everyone with a >1Gbit internet connection

There are still far more people below gigabit speeds than there are people hitting their gig. As more fiber is deployed that may change, but it's still a very functional device regardless.

The cost of 2.5G chipsets is so low it really shouldn't matter especially for a 'premium' product like this.

Exactly my thought. Why not just spend the little extra and do 2.5G ports.

There is one potential hurdle though: they specifically mention that it can handle 1G of traffic even if you enable a bunch of features. They would have had to upgrade the processors to be able to make the same claim at 2.5

That's with all the features on though right? I'm sure a lot of folks wouldn't be using VPN, deep packet inspection, ad blocking, a large number of routes and vlans, IDS, caching etc all at once, it hardly takes any CPU processing to simply route 2.5G (or hell, even 10G) through a firewall.

Solid points, but there’s a little bit of history (the details are fuzzy for me so apologies to anything I get wrong): When 1Gbps internet connections were starting to be widely available Unifi put out some “1Gbps” products that could only route 1Gbps with nothing turned on. It quickly dropped to 300Mbps if someone wanted to use any of the Unifi features and people called them out.

If they are making it a point to address that in this current product I feel like they want to make sure that type of call out doesn’t happen again.

This is surprisingly common, SonicWall devices are kind of market segmented by how much they can process with security services enabled. We installed 50/50 fiber at a customer location and their SonicWall had a gig WAN, but with the device set to "Maximum Security" it only got about 30-35 meg download speed. "Performance Optimized" let it hit the 50/50 lmao

It’s called market segmentation. Their other machines do 2.5-10g but this isn’t those products.

This thing is listed at $150. That's not exactly a "premium" product. Linksys sells routers for more money than this.

I dont think a $149 Mesh router is exactly in the premium segment.

I guess they could always do a Tri-Band, WiFI 6E with 2 2.5xGbps Ethernet for $199. ( That would be awesome )

It's not the cost of ports, but doing all the traffic processing for +500% of bandwith.

2.5G is absolutely nothing for modern chipsets and processors.

And do they cost the same?

I also wouldn't call it nothing, 2.5g switches have much higher consumption and get hotter, let alone 10g.

I’ve got 2.5G switches at home and they easily run off 12V 0.8A power adapters (8 port 2.5G 1x 10g)

I don’t know if you mean managed switches, but unmanaged switch processing is way less complex than routing.

Switching packets in hardware is trivial (assuming you have a chip). If you want to process them in software you need something more beefy.

With that logic why does it even have a gigabit uplink, after all three are still people out there that are not "hitting their 100Mbit/s" yet?

If we're being arbitrary who cares if it has fast Ethernet? 10 megabit is enough to stream Netflix.

Perhaps putting it another way will help -- according to the FCC's most recently release Internet reports[1], only 13% of subscribers have at least 940 mbps down. However, 57% are at least 100 mbps, but less than 940 mbps. There's a juicer market segment for gig and below than there is for above gig. Increasing the prices to attract 13% of the market isn't terribly worth it in this case.

1. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-395960A1.pdf

There's a ton of households with >100Mbit home internet. There's pretty few with >1Gbit even available, even fewer actually subscribed.

it also means your home network is slower.

Why should a backup from my laptop to my file server be limited to 1gbps? Has nothing to do with outside connection. Tehre are a lot of use cases for faster home networking irrelevant of network speed to the external world

Sure, but it's just a single port LAN router. If you have a 10G switch it's going to have a MAC table and let your laptop talk directly to your file server over Ethernet.

Otherwise the wireless throughput is nowhere near gigabit so you would be limited by that anyway.

You're assuming flat subnet without VLANS. If you bother doing backups, segmenting them off is a pretty standard security practice.

This is my biggest knock against Ubiquiti at the moment. They have no real solutions in the 2.5GbE/10GbE market.

The UDM-SE I have has a 10Gbps and 2.5Gbps WAN ports:

https://store.ui.com/us/en/pro/category/all-unifi-cloud-gate...

They also have multi-Gbps switches up to 25Gbps SFP28:

https://store.ui.com/us/en?category=all-switching

Ah nice! And looking further, it appears their U6-Enterprise and U6-Enterprise-IW both support 2.5GbE uplinks.

From reports online the UDM-SE won’t actually NAT close to 10 Gbps and the manufacturer doesn’t provide any NAT performance numbers…so it becomes a bottle neck if you have 10 Gbps internet which is widely available and not that expensive my part of the world. (Hong Kong).

The only reasonably priced router I could find about 6 months ago that would NAT at line speed was the TP-LINK Onada ER8411. I ended up going with an all Oanda network which seems to work fine but ubiquiti had originally been my first choice.

I recently encounter this as my ISP upgraded me to 10 Gbps over fiber: the UDM-PRO/SE does/can have a 10/2.5 Gbps WAN port over SPF+, but all the Ethernet ports go over to the COU via the same 1/2.5Gbps interface bottleneck [1]. If you really want to use your 10/2.5 Gbps you’re going to have run your services directly on the UDM or go out though the SPF+ port and serve from there via another switch, but then the point of having an UDM is kinda moot. I wish this was more explicitly advertised when I first bought it.

[1] https://ubntwiki.com/products/unifi/unifi_dream_machine_pro

This is to my massive irritation. I don't want to use the router built into my cable modem, but my Internet is 1.2gb and I feel like I'm throwing money away.

Routers with 2.5gbe uplink are hard to find and even more expensive.

The Mikrotik RB5009 is very affordable and has both SFP+ and 1x 2.5G Ethernet. And you can use either port as WAN or LAN depending on your setup. Will still need a switch however if you have more 2.5G clients.

$200 for a router without a built-in wireless AP isn't what I would call a deal for a home router.

Arguably, > 1G is outside the range of home equipment as most consumers have no need for it. You're asking a 2.5G router, a WiFi 6 AP, and a multi-gig switch all in one package. Most people who care about these also know better than to buy an all-in-one router since they are typically very limited in configuration options, especially if you need any sort of routing tables.

ASUS has some all-in-ones with 2x 10GbE ports but I wouldn't recommend them to anyone.

I disagree. Maybe 5 years ago that was true, but I have very affordable Comcast home internet that is 1.2gb - and it's only expected to get faster. I know very few people who don't have gigabit these days. Between Cable and Fiber it's cheap and regularly available.

The market is undeserving the everyday consumer.

It's why there are multiple YouTube channels dedicated to reviewing Chinese no-name 2.5gb switches from AliExpress. The big names have just turned to blind eye to pump out the same outdated devices they've been pumping out for years.

It actually is quite a good price. Not that I would actually buy it, I would go Mini PC and OPNSense for a router.

You're looking at the wrong unifi product then. UDM Pro SE (for example) you can choose between any two of (2x)1G, (1x)2.5 and (2x)10G SFP+ uplinks.

Obviously 2x 10G uplinks don't make a whole lot of sense ;)

Enabling the IDS drops throughout to about 3G (IIRC) but IDS is snake oil at the best of times.

Just curious what you (think) you need >1Gb WAN bandwidth for.

No, it pushes everyone with a >1Gbit internet connection into a pricier product.

This is my problem too. I love Ubiquiti's stuff when it works, but my home switches 10Gig at the moment, and 10Gig from my ISP is coming soon. Right now I run a full-on firewall 1U main server/router that can do that, but I'd drop it in a heartbeat if Ubiquiti had a reasonably priced (sub $1K) 10Gig version of exactly this product.

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