Opinions on the Ubiquiti UniFi ecosystem?

[Faustus]

Hello, all! Been quite awhile . The email associated with my account (Faust) is no longer active to I created a new account.

Anyways, a few years ago I rolled out a couple Ubiquiti APs and a wired/wireless bridge at work and they've been rock solid. Think it's been 2 years since I bounced them after firmware upgrade.

Fast forward to recently when my ISP flipped the switch on gigabit and being the consummate dork that I am I wasn't about to allow TCP overhead loss robbing me of ~5-15% of what I was paying for in this household (LAN was all GbE). So I splurged on a Dream Machine Pro SE to take advantage of the 2.5GbE copper WAN (also has SFP+ WAN) and the SFP+ LAN which I stuffed a copper adapter into to feed my main system. Needless to say I really like it but before I decide to invest in the whole Ubiquiti ecosystem I wanted to get more professional opinions. I have no interest in their cloud services, though.

I have one of those Intel NUC boxes with 4x 2.5GbE ports on it to run run pfSense to see if that sways be the other way but thus far I'm still digging on what I've seen so far.

Thank you!

[Philip]

Hi Faust! Sent you a PM about recovering your regular account.

My first thought is a purpose-built Ubiquity products may perform better than the NUC, but it depends, I haven't used them much other than a few P2P Wi-Fi bridges and APs. You'd want to talk to YSCat, he has done much more extensive work with Ubiquity products. He comes around, but haven't seen him on the board these days.

Good to see you around!

[Faust]

Got it, thank you, sir!

As I mentioned, I am very happy with it thus far. It has some nice features like IDS/IPS, ad blocking, VPN server/client, plus a boatload of things I haven't messed with yet. Probably a bit overkill for my needs but its ability to tie together its other products like surveillance and wifi.

A NUC with pfSense or OpnSense can do all these things as well (aside from adopting Ubiquiti devices at the layer the UDM-SE can) with plug-ins IIRC, but I think you're right in that what I have will be a bit faster as well as a bit easier to use (haven't used pfSense for over 10 years so it may be more polished and user friendly now). I'll give the NUC a shot when it comes in and see how it compares. Worst case it I take the Ubiquiti to work to tie together the APs.

Anyways, great "seeing" ya, Philip!

[YeOldeStonecat]

Faust Can't Fly!!!

Hey Scott, been a minute...lol..or a heck of a lot more.

...and...not too long ago, had a conversation with someone ..remembering the "discwasher" system.

Ubiquiti...I've deployed a few hundred of their networks, we started using Ubiquiti products back when Unifi was mostly just the APs...and their other switches and routers were the Edge* series. Usually combined with an Untangle firewall. Since then, Unifi has grown and matured a lot. Early on their "cloud key" controllers were...meh, and the early versions crashed a lot. THey revamped those, and now they have the controller built into the gateways on those models, and they have quite a few model gateways that need to be connected to a controller, and we have a over a hundred of those networks managed over at Hostifi.

Love love love the ecosystem. We stock TONS of their equipment, and have networks out there from small office SOHO sized ones, to medium sizes, to larger networks at schools and very large companies....like...stacks of 48 port switches...with 10 gig aggregate switches at the top, and dozens and dozens of APs.

Dunno if you're still around to read this (almost a year later)...hopefully so....