Time to wake up to what Ubiquiti really is

How many wifi6 devices do you have?

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Who even has any wifi 6 products available? Itā€™s not that I need it it but since I need to get rid of my patchwork network, why not go with the latest standard?

Iā€™m kinda weighing things against ubi offerings. Their wifi 6 ap set a pretty high bar. Not to mention most others residentials, linksys, tp link, netgear etc all have wifi 6 offerings.

I just stumbled across UniFi Controller 6.1.71 ā€“ More GARBAGE.

[ā€¦] UniFi sucks. Period. Once the underdog that proved all the big network players wrong, now just an empty shell of execā€™s and marketing idiots who donā€™t know anything about running a business or networking or computers. [ā€¦]

Speaks for itself ā€¦

Here we have a potential competitor to the UniFi-portfolio: TP-Linkā€™s OMADA series .

And when it comes to wifi 6: Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) seriesļ¼Œintegrated into Omada SDN

Tempted more and more to ditch my Upiquiti gear ā€¦ :roll_eyes:

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tp link has long history of undisclosed back door and poor response to reported security issues.

This is non starter for me unless they make some drastic change in business practices. better off staying with ubiquiti (running locally) vs tp link cloud managed security issue waiting to happen. even locally im sure someone will find hard coded password in a year or three

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Iā€™ve been considering Aruba WiFi kit, based on this blog post, although itā€™s WAY more expensive than the Unifi APs that Iā€™m currently using. I havenā€™t looked into network switches yet, I have two Unifi switches currently - one PoE and one not.

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Not using any Ubiquiti devices myself, so let me ask, what is it, that these devices seem to do so special?
I canā€™t see any reason, why to buy them at all, but thatā€™s me, as I said, never used one of theseā€¦

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i use in past and currently for PtP wireless bridge local network to remote building.
easily 300 ft in past
currently 100 ft.
total cost (2) ubiquiti nano ap about $100.
Working 2 years so far and been through 2 hurricanes and below zero weather and extreme heat.
took 20 minutes at initial install to config and setup.
This is both extremly cheap and relaible enough that I rely on it as only means for facilty access and in other case main WAN connection for medical imaging facility.

AP are cheap and reliable for home/small office/even large facilty.
$40 to $100 with no license requirments
switches are decent price
management software was cheap and easy

minimum security issues over years in world where cisco, linksys and others had undisclosed hardcoded passwords.

Ubuiqiti was not great but it was cheap, fairly reliable, flexible and decently secure

I never love the company but competitors were (3) times cost with issues or being bought and sold constantly. For a while I guess, company was stable enough for the price/function

just my opinion. as i say, I always expect shoe to drop eventually but figured issue would be business matter not security matter so i feel it OK tradeoff

@paddy0174
what you using?

EDIT
I forget to mention that prior to ubiquiti i use netgear and linksys product and wifi dropout and need to reboot was the norm. Ubiquiti was set it and forget it. I could not get that level relaibility without large cost with other product. Cost and reliability is huge factor

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They are prosumer devices that allow for better network management and capacity over consumer equipment. For instance, I have 119 devices on my network:

image

On normal, consumer grade equipment, I could never come close to supporting that number of devices or that kind of traffic. But with prosumer/enterprise equipment, I can. Typically, your normal ā€œend usersā€ will never require that kind of horsepower, but with WiFi IoT devices becoming cheaper and more available, itā€™s going to become an issue for people that run all-in-one (TP-Link, Netgear, etc) router/modem combos. They just cannot handle more than 25-30 clients reliably.

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First off, this is really genuine questioning. :wink: And thanks for your answer.

I have a FritzBox and behind that a seperate router (an Asus something with OpenWRT) for all the IoT devices. Up until now without problems. Would that be kind of the same, just not as comfortable?

But I can see, that this makes sense for some people. If the network grows, there must be hardware that fits the new needs. Unfortunately there doesnā€™t seem to be a lot of alternatives, which is always bad for us as users/consumers.

Of course!

Not really. Prosumer/Enterprise equipment is built for high performance and low latency. Typically they have larger backplanes along with bigger CPUs and much more RAM than youā€™ll find in consumer grade equipment. This enables enterprise equipment to route much more traffic much faster than consumer-grade equipment can.

Think of it like this: A car can typically carry about 750lbs of weight without much of an issue for moderate distances. A semi-truck can carry upwards of 15 tons of weight across longer distances. In this analogy, the car is consumer-grade equipment while the semi-truck is prosumer/enterprise equipment.

Quite accurate. However, there are some companies that are getting better at software-defined networking and as Ubiquiti keeps messing up, more and more companies are going to lower their prices to attract those that are unhappy. TP-Link (while yeah, a HUGE security risk, imho) dropped their prices over the past 3 months by close to 10% across the board. Cisco/Meraki, Netgear and others will probably follow suit soon.

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That would be indeed a no-go for implementing any TP-Link device to any network!

But do you mind to to share your sources to that statement? That kind of business practices is widely known from D-Link (which might be the reason why nobody is mentioning that company in this thread).

All I can find about TP-Linkā€™s policy on security issues is the usual stuff which they share with more or less all other network device companies. I canā€™t find any backdoor-issues nor poor responses to reported security issues (in fact poor responses about security issues is hot with Ubiquiti as lately pointed out by Krebs on Security).

When it comes to Ubiquiti sadly I donā€™t think that company will survive the coming 2-3 years but will get sold-off to some investment company and thereafter the common fate kicks in until nothing is left.

Hereā€™s an interesting thread on the TPLink forums.

tldr: A lot of tplink routers transmit a secondary hidden SSID used for mesh backhaul. It canā€™t be turned off, is also transmitted on routers that donā€™t have mesh support, gives full access to everything connected to the router and uses an obscure, proprietary protocol with a PSK generated by an algorithm only known to tplink, that has already been compromised in a PoC. People are requesting a switch to turn it off if not needed. More than one year later, tplink finally releases a beta firmware that supposedly letā€™s people turn the hidden network off - and it doesnā€™t actually turn it off.

tplinkā€™s official answer: ā€œThe hidden SSID is for OneMesh and itā€™s very safe. It doesnā€™t have any security vulnerabilities.ā€

Yeah right.

I have a small tplink nano travel router, itā€™s a little portable thingy without any mesh network capability. Yet it is also transmitting this hidden backhaul SSID when in client mode. Thatā€™s how I stumbled on the thread above. Very shady.

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A no-go indeed! Thank you for sharing that info :+1:t4:

When I bought an Archer C7 years ago (before switching to UniFi) first thing I did was flashing it to DD-WRT although I didnā€™t know about above flaw :laughing:

I just remember this being an issue for primarily linksys, dlink, zyxel and others but donā€™t remember all details. Just that after that I avoid them mostly. Below has some info
https://www.fkie.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/fkie/de/documents/HomeRouter/HomeRouterSecurity_2020_Bericht.pdf

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Personally I use Draytek routers for over 20 years - Just few weeks ago upgraded to Vigor 2927L, it is my 4th Draytek router. Every single update was caused by upgrade to data link speed, that previous router could not handle. I also have 3 Draytek APs (VigorAP 903 and VigorAP 802) and these also works flawlessly.
Every time I made router replacement I made some research on the market trying to identify best for me device (well, Iā€™m a bit picky, having some more advanced features configured on my LAN). and every single time my research was leading me back to Draytek. Obviously there are devices that are functionally capable of doing the same things, but frequently this requires either to used dedicated tools or CLIā€¦ that I do not like.
Ubiquiti was for some time on my short list, I felt in love with their UI and how all of devices in their ecosystem integrateā€¦ but when I started to dig for specific functionalities I need, I found how complex it is to use some basic operations (line make static IP reservations for ~80 devices) or that some are not possible at all.
So I know that after 20 years with Draytek Iā€™m biased, but I can highly recommend their devices!

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TBH, for me its kinda scarry to use only one supplier for my network equipp. Especially, when all equip is connected to each other and managed at a single point like with ubiquiti.
My personal preference is using a gateprotect firewall (theyre now belonging to rohde&schwarz) as the router, dumb wifi AP for a few esphome nodes, my laptop and my mobile in its own physical network and having the rest of my network connected via LAN over a dumb zyxel switch. The APĀ“s are using openWRT so that im sure i can do whatever i want on them. Ok, the firewall is overkill for my needs and if i havent got it for work id rather use a pc with openSense on it, but it works fine.
And as anything is managed by a just one idiot, i know who to blame if theres something wrong.
Also im not a fan of ā€œeverything cloud connectedā€. Way too much points for failure (i see you murphy) and privacy concerns.
BTW my background consists of a strict dad with hate onto every social media, which was an it security expert and im a dude who loves modifiying almost anything from video games (skyrim with over 100 mods was normal for me), the OS of my smartphone (android custom roms, root, xposed framework and so on) and now the whole electronic devices im using. Just wanna say, these points are my point of view with a very niche use.

To be fair, this only applies to their consumer routers and AIO equipment. The Omada routers and Jetstream switches do not do this, nor does their managed APs. In fact, the Omada SDN has survived pretty much every pen test so far. The last reported vulnerability in the SDN controller was back in 2018 and that was patched fairly quickly. Credit where credit is due; Their consumer products are typically crap, but their prosumer/enterprise gear has been getting some good accolades and reviews recently.

Iā€™m no expert and was considering ubiquiti as an easy upgrade of my home net
Now I have doubts
How come no one mentioned mikrotik?
Iā€™m happily running one of their 4g cpe

Because Mikrotikā€™s SDN offering is years behind what others like Ubiquiti, Meraki, Aruba, Omada and others offer. Mikrotikā€™s SDN called ā€˜OpenFlowā€™ (which isnā€™t really a true SDN) has been in perpetual beta for years now.