A quick note on my consideration of the Ubiquiti Unifi range
I had looked at the Unifi range of products (was not particularly interested in their consumer grade Amplifi range) when trying to setup my modest home network. This is the go to brand for most low voltage professional installations, even moderate enterprise level installations and lately folks in the prosumer area who got fed up of consumer level products and thought why not self install these at home. They have a wide range of products and probably more affordable than Cisco Meraki type of equipment. The product line has a lot of Apple clean design traits given that their CEO once worked at Apple as an engineer.
This is mostly my process of evaluation for my use case and budget and not by any means a review from experience of using their products…
I had initially thought about using my existing router and getting 2 UAP AC Lites, which are almost what anyone recommends, due to their low cost (~$80) and decent performance. I could download their controller software on an unused laptop I had lying around and be in business.
But these are 2x2 and not Wave 2. At that price, the TP-Link Omada EAP-225s seemed like a better option. Actually they are in the $50-$60 range and wave 2 APs.
Next up were the Nano HD and Flex HD, they were wave 2 and had 4x4 radios for their 5 Ghz band and similarly priced. Nano HDs have a similar ceiling mount disc form factor, the Flex HD form factor was so attractive for the house, even though they push into the $200 territory. I thought maybe 1 or 2 Flex HDs were the way to go.
Then I tried to look up the hardware specs, they were difficult to find. Found out they used Mediatek chips and not Qualcomm. I was surprised at that price point, I did not want to go with Mediatek based hardware, however attractive they looked. Now there is also the UAP-AC-HD which is 4x4 and Qualcomm based, but that pushes each unit in the $350 to $400 range, which did not seem justifiable to me, at least for my modest needs.
On the whole their Controller software provides a lot of options and visibility into the network, for someone who just wants plug and play (with sub-optimal default settings) to someone who wants to geek out and is obsessed to fine tune everything to the smallest level, also they have extremely attractive kits. But I couldn’t justify the spend, their lower cost APs did not seem like good value. Also with another new addition to the family, I wasn’t sure I would have the time to tinker with all the settings.
