[Network|UniFi] Review “My dream system with Underwhelming Specs”

★★★★☆Features☆★★★★

Four star features are range, aesthetics, setup and value.

Range

Even though my home square footage of 3800 should be sufficiently covered by couple access points/mesh nodes, this had never been possible in any of the products I’ve tried: Netgear Orbi, Eero Pro and Asus AiMesh. I surmise this is due to the my home being older built; therefore, walls are not WiFi friendly. To my surprise, 2 access points of UniFi have sufficiently cover end to end of my home allowing me to stream Netflix, Plex anywhere in my home. I believe practical experience of the wider range coverage here is coming from stable and usable 2.4 GHz band. With 2 AP UniFi setup, many areas in my home are only sufficiently covered by 2.4 GHz band with speed test number measuring below 50 Mbps in many areas. In contrast, 4 node AiMesh network had most areas covered with 5GHz band except still had some area still were intermittent 5GHz coverage. However, from the user perspective, the difference is the daily practical experience. On UniFi network, if I do not run the speed test, I won’t know if I’ve been connected to 5GHz or 2.4 GHz bands. This is because in areas with poor 5GHz band coverage, all I do is net surfing, video and music streaming so with functioning 2.4 GHz band I just don’t notice any issue, which wasn’t a case with Asus system.

AP nodes placed on desk rather than mounting on the wall or ceiling are working well covering both ground or basement levels in either configuration: ground floor placed AP covering basement, basement placed AP covering ground floor. My current office room in the basement had previously been one of the hardest area to get WiFi signal. Now with nanoHD placed in the ground level just above the office room I get great WiFi speed: iPhone 11 Pro over 350 Mbps, MBP 15” 2016 model over 450 Mbps.

From this point on is primary driven by my obsession with an excuse to satisfy my wife by cleaning up congested kitchen utility rack, I’ve decided to add POE powered, 4 ethernet port containing AP unit, IW-HD. This third AP should give more area of 5GHz band coverage and the last bit of missing 2.4 GHz band coverage throughout my home.

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Aesthetics

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WiFi router/mesh or access points are not for home decoration so the most ideal design for APs are ones that are transparent. Coming from Asus, UniFi products have far less intrusive look. I put UniFi APs on pars with Eero and better than Orbi for it look. I still prefer Nest Wifi device for the visual though.

Setup/App UI

UniFi product setup uses dedicated mobile app. For me, I use iOS version. The app is actually well designed for what it can do. Simplicity and feature-richness are inverse proportion in their relationship and that rule affects here.

Due to the sheer amount of features UniFi Controller provides, initial setup is not just plug and play. Although I consider this is one of the best controller app for the balance of feature and usability, there are some situations I felt could have been better implemented.

There is a little learning curve and once you get familiar with it, setting up new UniFi device would take less than couple minutes. However, I did have a couple issues with struggle while setting up UDM Pro and APs though these are partly related to my specific scenario, I believe its worth taking a star off as Ubiquiti could have done better here.

UDM Pro Setup

As I usually want to be cautious and take one step at a time to make trouble shooting of new setup easier, I placed UDM Pro in my basement utility room and connected it to Asus Ax11000 Router located in the ground floor level kitchen via Ethernet cable first. I then booted UDM Pro, the setup screen was intuitive and updated firmware immediately. This confirmed to be UDM Pro is not defective.

Next, I tried to take out Ax11000 router as UDM Pro is going to be the new router. This is where I created a struggle myself. Somewhere along the process, I lost which ethernet cable connects to where. Without realizing my problems was actually the hardwiring, I ended up doing multiple power on and off UDM Pro because UDM Pro won’t allow me to do any setup when internet is not connected.

UDM Pro setup needs active internet connection

During this process, UDM Pro became soft bricked as I got an error message on its built in tiny touch panel that system failed to boot. In spite of repeated rebooting, I could not get beyond the error screen. This got me a bit concerned as I was not able to establish internet connection to UDM Pro, I knew it could not get access to new firmware. At this point, I had no other option but to push physical reset button. Fortunately, the reset worked and I was back to no internet connection step. After some more trouble shooting, I eventually figured out the hardwiring was the conundrum . Once the internet connection was established to the UDM Pro, following step by step instruction on the UniFi app was a breeze.

Hard reset successfully restored soft bricked UDM Pro despite lack of internet connection

If Ubiquiti had made the system so that it would setup without internet connection, I could have first set it up and then figured issue lies on internet cable much faster. But since I was not certain if issue lied on the cabling, UDM Pro or modem, the troubleshooting took much longer.

Access Point setup

Once I got UDM Pro running, I’ve connected nano-HD and HD access points via Ethernet cable and WiFi was immediately active. However, I could not get UniFi App to list/recognize Access Points under UDM Pro Controller.

Eventually, I realized my UniFi Access Points were originally set up as standalone access points as I used these APs under Asus AiMesh network setup before UDM Pro arrival. My assumption, and probably many others, is once UniFi APs are physically connected to UDM Pro, they would automatically be recognized as UDM Pro for their controller; however, it turned out APs that had already been set up as a stand-alone AP would stay that way without any prompt. As a new UniFi user and seeing all systems I used to this date either automatically link or at least prompting if I want to add new satellite/node/access point, figuring this out took me sometime.

UniFi Access Point will not automatically re-provision even when physically connected to UniFi controller device.

Value

UniFi has a great cost performance. Although I ended up getting UDM Pro, I think most home consumer should get regular UDM. I think most should get nanoHD rather than HD access point to extend Wireless coverage.

Actual price comparison from various manufactures are much harder now a days due to the fact each manufacture now have budget friendly and flagship product lines. In above, I listed some of popular competitors. As we can see, UniFi suites are expensive end for WiFi 5 system but cheaper than WiFi 6 system. I consider the best comparison here is AiMesh from Asus.

This is because both UniFi and AiMesh setup Asus products have discrete router level of features while mesh network systems like Nest WiFi, Orbi, Eero have limited features. Having said this, AiMesh setup for Asus has so many options where I could have picked other combination of routers that are cheaper yet WiFi 6 compatible, or go all way down to WiFi 5 setup for best apple to apple comparison. Regardless, above is what I had chosen/would have chosen if I were to go with AiMesh setup in attempt to get the best theoretical performance. So in comparison to the AiMesh setup, UniFi has a reasonable value.