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Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

I hooked my home up with 3 Unifi AC Pros + ERPOE5 in 2015/2016. They've been running for 8 straight years without ever restarting. Never had a problem.

Granted, I never updated the firmware in the 8 years. Heck, I'm not even sure how I can get back to the web UI to control them.

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Its fine to use at home, but I see a lot of people pretend these are Enterprise devices and use them as such. They are upgraded consumer gear, at best, imo.

Source: I've been working with unifi gear for the past 4+ years and use a basic unifi setup at home, since it was free to me. I wouldn't have bought it.

Like all things, YMMV. I'm glad to hear its working like you need it to.

What would you have a bought instead? In my experience there isn’t anything comparable in the consumer space. I’d love to be shown I’m wrong. I use both their network gear and security setup (door bells, cameras).

I’m not sure there is another company offering the same solution with ease of setup and low overhead to manage. Is there?

I guess this depends on use-case. I mean, if someone has a need for the more advanced features of a router/firewall like this, then they don't need the consumer focused UI.

If someone doesn't know networking well enough, then the UI isn't helpful really since they don't know the why of things.

It's a great niche, but Unifi has issues and they seem more focused on selling more of them, than fixing issues present for 5+ years.

Here's an example: Unifi uses Strongswan for VPN. There is a bug in that 2 people cannot connect to the VPN site from the same IP. Site2Site between 2 unifi devices has been unreliable.

As far as what I would have bought, it's moot, since I'm not the common use case. At one point, I used an ASA 5510 as a home router. ;)

Use the Unifi phone app to manage them. You can manage the APs themselves without logging into anything. I’d recommend updating the firmware after 8 years, you can always do a hard reset to get the original back.

Hard reset will not automatically downgrade the firmware.

And I don't think it's a good idea to manage multiple APs using the app instead of from the controller. Managing a single AP from the app is ok, but I think you'll run into problems when you have multiple in a network.

Hard agree. Especially if you have something like the UDM/UDM-P and are managing VLAN-specific SSIDs and so forth.

OP didn’t ask about managing from the controller. I prefer the controller and use it myself. Some of my family members do not want a controller and use the Unifi APs I suggest.

It is unlikely that a home user has network functions in use that rely on the controller.

My point still stands for multiple APs.

For example, you can't set up meshing from the mobile app. Best you can do is give them all the same SSID/password, and they also have to be wired in that scenario.

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