About six months ago, I got fed up with my Meraki MR34 APs. They ran just fine, but they needed attention. They needed licenses. They needed me to pay for a dashboard I used rarely but yet had to keep up yearly. And that dashboard had most of the “advanced” features hidden away under lock and key. I was beyond frustrated. I happen to be at the Wireless LAN Professionals Conference (WLPC) and ran into Darrell DeRosia (@Darrell_DeRosia) about my plight. His response was pretty simple:

“Dude, you should check out Ubiquiti.”

Now, my understanding of Ubiquiti up to that point was practically nothing. I knew they sold into the SMB side of the market. They weren’t “enterprise grade” like Cisco or Aruba or even Meraki. I didn’t even know the specs on their APs. After a conversation with Darrell and some of the fine folks at Ubiquiti, I replaced my MR34s with a UniFI AP-AC-HD and an AP-AC-InWall-Pro. I also installed one of their UniFi Security Gateways to upgrade my existing Linksys connection device.

You may recall my issue with redundancy and my cable modem battery when I tried to install the UniFi Security Gateway for the first time. After I figured out how to really clear the ARP entries in my cable modem I got to work. I was able to install the gateway and get everything back up and running on the new Ubiquiti APs. How easy was it? Well, after renaming the SSID on the new APs to the same as the old one, I was able to connect all my devices without anyone in the house having to reconnect any of their devices. As far as they knew, nothing changed. Except for the slightly brighter blue light in my office.

I installed the controller software on a spare machine I had running. No more cloud controllers for me. I knew that I could replicate those features with a Ubiquiti Cloud Key, but my need to edit wireless settings away from home was pretty rare.

Edit: As pointed out by my fact checked Marko Milivojevic, you don’t need a Cloud Key for remote access. The Cloud Key functions more as a secure standalone controller instance that has remote access capabilities. You can still run the UniFi controller on lots of different servers, including dedicated rack-mount gear or a Mac Mini (like I have).

I logged into my new wireless dashboard for the first time:

It’s lovely! It gives me all the info I could want for my settings and my statistics. At a glance, I can see clients, devices, throughput, and even a quick speed test of my WAN connection. You’re probably saying to yourself right now “So what? This kind of info is tablestakes, right?” And you wouldn’t be wrong. But, the great thing about Ubiquiti is that its going to keep working after 366 days of installation without buying any additional licenses. It’s not going to start emailing me telling me it’s time to sink a few hundred dollars into keeping the lights on. That’s a big deal for me at home. Enterprises may be able to amortize license costs over the long haul but small businesses aren’t so lucky.

The Ubiquiti UniFi dashboard also has some other great things. Like a settings page:

Why is that such a huge deal? Well, Ubiquiti doesn’t remove functionality from the dashboard. They put it where you can find it. They make it easy to tweak settings without wishing on a star. They want you to use the wireless network the way you need to use it. If that means enabling or disabling features here and there to get things working, so be it. Those features aren’t locked away behind a support firewall that needs an act of Congress to access.

But the most ringing endorsement of Ubiquiti for me? Zero complaints in my house. Not once has anyone said anything about the wireless. It just “works”. With all the streaming and Youtube watching and online video game playing that goes on around here it’s pretty easy to saturate a network. But the Ubiquiti APs have kept up with all the things that have been thrown at them and more.

I also keep forgetting that I even have them installed. That’s a good thing. Because I don’t spend all my time tinkering with them they tend to fade away into the background of the house. Even the upstairs in-wall AP is chugging right along and serving clients with no issues. Small enough to fit into a wall box, powerful enough to feed Netflix for a whole family.

Tom’s Take

I must say that I’m very impressed by Ubiquiti. My impressions about their suitability for SMB/SME was all wrong. Thanks to Darrell I now know that Ubiquiti is capable of handling a lot of things that I considered “enterprise only” features. Even Lee Hutchinson at Are Technica is a fan of Ubiquiti at home. I also noticed that the school my kids attend installed Ubiquiti APs over the summer. It looks like Ubiquiti is making in-roads into SMB/SME and education. And it’s a very workable solution for what you need from a wireless system. Add in the fact that the software doesn’t require yearly upkeep and it makes all the sense in the world for someone that’s not ready to commit to the treadmill of constant licensing.