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Comment by TimTheTinker | Hacker News Reader

Not to be that guy, but...

If you want multiple SSIDs, roaming, daily neighbor scanning and auto channel selection, etc, but don't like to spend hours tinkering with your equipment beyond the physical setup, then Ubiquiti UniFi equipment is great.

I stopped recommending UniFi around 2020 (several of their best engineers had left, and they made some dumb choices), but IMO they're back to being a decent choice. And I appreciate that they're become a one-stop solution for all home/SOHO as well as mid size enterprise IT needs.

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Yep exactly. This stuff quickly falls into “choose your battles” for me, and I’d rather just offload the issue

As long as you're happy with having your home wi-fi potentially controlled by the cloud...

The Unifi range is quite definitely optional cloud. Don't turn it on (and don't use a cloud-based controller!), and it won't have any mechanism for control.

You can even use the mobile apps over direct connection, with local auth and no cloudy relay required.

You can run the controller on your own hardware, without any outside internet access if you so wish. It’s as cloud as you want it. They also support direct remote access.

Ubiquity would have added another zero (at least) to the price here and bring cloud features I very determinedly did not want to have in the first place (check the original post at https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/09/14/1630).

This wasn't hours of tweaking. Well, over almost a year, maybe two hours, but no more than that.

Unifi doesn't have any cloud requirements that I know of. But yes they are more expensive than the hardware you've got, at $100 per AP.

For my needs unifi was worth it to not have to deal with OpenWRT again, or worse, stock firmware on consumer APs.

> For my needs unifi was worth it to not have to deal with OpenWRT again...

Amusingly, I was quite willing to put up with a day or two of tinkering and puzzling over the -occasionally godawful- docs to never have to deal with Unfi and the rest of UBNT's software ever again. Even my recent move from my OpenWRT-"powered" UAP-LR/LITE to my OpenWRT Ones required only a little bit of fussing with the configs I copied over from the -LR and -LITE... and that was because of the difference in device names between the UBNT hardware and the One hardware.

What about the radio/antenna quality? I have a UniFi U6 Pro and it covers my whole house (~3000 sqft, 2-story) providing nearly gigabit WiFi speed everywhere to my WiFi 6 devices. I don't know how much the radio/antenna helps (4x4, 6 spatial streams) but I don't see how the OpenWRT One would be an improvement besides its hackability.

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