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

★★★☆☆Features☆☆★★★

I don’t really have any major complaints on UniFi ecosystem. The lowest scoring features for me are 3 stars here. These include customer support, specifications and incomplete UniFi OS.

Customer Support

UniFi Web interface has a 24/7 live chat support. It is under one of the main menu i.e. they don’t even try hiding it. Although this may be an entirely a norm for enterprise products but as a home network user I’ve never seen this, especially for free. As far as the quality of the technical support, it is better than typical consumer line product representatives, but I don’t think true enterprise quality.

UniFi Web interface has a free 24/7 live chat support.

I used this once trying to figure out why iOS throughput heat map giving me an error stating I am using remote access despite I was not. The customer support representative tried his best asking to me to send couple screen shots and he consulted tier 2 team. After an hour, mostly waiting time, I eventually had to leave without a real solution. I then found a community forum discussing this as a known still not yet supported feature on UniFi OS. I had wished support rep could have guided me to the page but I know that’s too much to ask for free. So I say don’t expect true tech support here. You are better off using highly active official forum and get help from knowledgable users.

Underwhelming Specs for 2020

Update 5/27/2020

Wi-Fi 6 Access Points are on its way. One is already on early access stage.

This is just my personal obsession but I really like the latest technology. UniFi currently does not have WiFi 6 compatible Access Points. Even though I purchased the highest model of the Access Point for home user, UAP-AC-HD (paying almost $300), its specs are merely 800 Mbps for 2.4 GHz band and only one 1733 Mbps for 5 MHz. Since current trend by manufactures are combining all bands throughput together to give a big number (advertisement trick), flagship routers on many consumer brands have “11000” rating such as my previous WiFi 6 compatible Asus Ax11000. On the contrary, UniFi’s number with this scheme is merely 2533. We are talking about factor of 4 difference.

UniFi currently does not have WiFi 6 compatible Access Points.

I myself have tested UniFi AP HD against Asus Ax11000 as AiMesh node and I know Unifi AP HD outperformed Asus and real world experience are superior on UniFi. Despite knowing such, it still bothers me the spec look so much inferior.

Real world experience are superior on UniFi. It’s just the spec.

I have originally thought may be WiFi 6 is still early for enterprise setting; however, UniFi’s direct competitors in enterprise network category like Cisco Meraki, Ruckus, Aruba already have WiFi 6 access points. So I am sure it’s just a matter of time.

Final Thoughts

Unless UniFi product suddenly breaks i.e. reliability issue, this is the home network system I would recommend to all from now on. I have finally found my dream home network system. UniFi is the first system check all marks with stable, speedy, scalable, flexible feature rich network ecosystem. Their misleading underwhelming specs with lack of WiFi 6 compatible Access Point may be an only disadvantage*.

Even though Small Net Builder agrees with my informal test result of WiFi 6 really does not give any throughput improvement over WiFi 5 on 5 GHz band on a single device (for now), I think real world experience is beyond that. My day to day experience since moving from WiFi 6 AiMesh setup to UniFi has been far superior. I believe this is mostly coming from the stability of the network, especially usable 2.4 GHz band.

*Update: 5/27/2020 – UniFi has officially filed FCC for Wi-Fi 6 access points and one of them is already available to purchase for early access users.