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I know there is lots of love for Ubiquiti here. I am thinking of using all their equipment for clients but have a really hard time with their support model. What I am looking for here is a frank discussion about why or why not for Ubiquiti. For point of reference, I am using the AC-Pro AP’s and four AirFiber P2P antennas so I am not going at this blind. If I do offer them, I would more than likely go through StreakWave as they say they offer assistance.

RIght now, my prefered WiFi offering to clients is OpenMesh, switches are D-Link DGS-1210 series, and routers/firewalls are ZyXel. Just looking at evaluating other options and Ubiquiti and Araknis are the two leading choices.

Like I said, I am just looking for a frank discussion.

@D-Link @Ubiquiti_Inc

12 Spice ups
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While their support model is pretty much community based, as of earlier this year they do offer paid “Premium” support with advanced RMA’s, expedited TechSupport, etc.

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Ubiquiti products are cheaper because they don’t put as much money into support/marketing/sales as the other guys

Your main point of support should be with the Ubiquiti distributor, if I have issues with their products, I deal with the distributor who deals with the RMA themselves or if I need hand-holding I can pay for tech support.

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Not sure what your budget is but Ubiquiti support is terrible dont want to be in a situation in a business atmosphere where you will need them you will be chatting with someone that may or may not know anything about the device your needing support on.

Meraki all the way

2 Spice ups
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For access points, I honestly believe that the UniFi APs are a no brainer. They are cheap enough that if one acts up, just replace it and don’t worry about the support. Now the switches and firewalls, that is something else. I am in a similar situation, in that I am evaluating the equipment myself. The first thing that I did was to buy a secure gateway for my home. I put it in place, but had issues getting the VPN up and running with an older Cisco ASA at my wife’s office (she has just one other employee) and the house. So, I just picked up a second gateway. I put my controller in Azure and it is running great there. The VPN was just as easy to setup for this connection as it is in Meraki gear, so I was happy about that. I then purchased a couple of switches for the house and they are also working flawlessly. I am extremely happy with this setup for the home / wife’s office. I was so happy with this, that when my contract for the managed firewalls at my office came up, I cancelled the contract (that is a rant by itself) and replaced the firewall with Unifi. This is where I am not quite so happy with the devices. I have most of my locations coming in through an MPLS network so everyone goes out 1 Internet connection. That is all fine and dandy. The issues that I am having are for some more advanced items. During this process, I am also moving into a data center and changing ISPs. I have also added a couple of locations that needed to be up quick, so couldn’t get them on the MPLS network right away. So, now I have two locations that have Internet (the new data center and the old HQ building). The people on the new MPLS provider go straight to the data center and out. The people on the old MPLS, come through HQ then route to the data center for server access but straight out to the Internet from HQ for other traffic. I also have these two new locations using cable broadband connections and UniFi gateways for an IPSEC tunnel back to the datacenter. The routing that is involved with this setup is a bit of a pain and the only way to do it is static routes. The VPN connections are great, but the routing stops working and I need to make some subtle changes to get connectivity back about once a week. This will be all going away over the next few months, so I am dealing with it. I also have a separate web filter for that side of it.

They also do have Elite support available now: https://community.ubnt.com/t5/UniFi-Wireless/UniFi-Elite-Cloud-Support-Warranty-Service-Announcement/td-p/1829545

I haven’t gone through Elite yet, but will probably be looking into it if I keep the devices at work.

TL:DR: I think they work great for small/home office, but if you need to do any routing or complex networking, you may want a better device.

2 Spice ups
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Personally I’ve been promoting ubiquiti to my customers for years. The lack of support never bothered me as I’ve always found what I needed within the community and have never had an issue where customers were down for extended periods because of this. I’ve found that their products just work. Once you set them up they tend to keep chugging along. That’s been my experience at least. Maybe others have different ones.

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Personally, I don’t like Ubiquiti for the Enterprise environment, they are more like a High-end Consumer/ low-end enterprise company. You usually get what you pay for in performance. They will work for a low client density areas, but they will start suffering in performance if you have too many clients. and never believe the hype about how many “theoretical” clients an AP can handle, Even The Ruckus R710 Claims up to 500 concurrent connections but I would have to see it to believe it. (I have seen over 200 and it didn’t miss a beat so maybe). Don’t get me wrong, they are good AP’s, but you need to evaluate your needs and purchase a solution that will fit those needs.

2 Spice ups
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Your concern is completely valid. Unless you are an expert in everything, you rely on vendor support when uptime is critical and a problem is outside of your scope. IMHO, this is one of the things that separates a good MSP/IT provider from a mediocre (or poor) company.

I use Ubiquiti equipment frequently, but absolutely not exclusively. I always evaluate every client’s needs and create a custom proposal that might (or might not) use the same vendors as another client. Everyone’s needs are different, and so should your solutions.

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I’ve been using Ubiquiti APs for nearly 5 years now in 10 locations across 3 US states. As I’ve been an IT staff of just 1 up until recently, Support for any solution I add to our company infrastructure is often more important to me than the product. However, I’ve not been disappointed by the “lack” of Ubiquti support because honestly I almost never need it. When I do, its easy enough to find on their website or in the community. They are also easy enough to add or swap out that I keep extras at locations and walk an employee through adding or swapping it.

I love the Ubituiti systems because they are relatively hassle free and just work. I wish more products were like that. Why can’t printers be like that? :slight_smile:

4 Spice ups
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You are already offering D-Link and Zyxel and you are worried about Ubiquiti’s support? Neither of them have very good support either in my experience…

Just understand that you don’t buy (or sell in your case) Ubiquiti for the support. You buy it because the price is right, and cheap enough that you simply replace an occasional bad unit. You also buy it because it is loaded with most features that the big guys have as well.

3 Spice ups
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Their support does suck. If you manage to speak to anyone, don’t expect them to be able to solve your issue. You’ll likely waste time. However, their products are very good for SMB and I haven’t ran into any issues yet.

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For me it really depends on the environment you’re working with.

For a small to medium business wireless networking Ubiquiti Uni-Fi is a no brainer. For Large to enterprise businesses I usually go for Cisco/Meraki or Aruba.

For wireless backbone networking Ubiquiti is the only way to go for price, management, and durability.

As far as support goes, I’ve never had an issue I couldn’t find a solution for on their website.

I usually prefer to work with higher end switches and routers because I’ve had to replace a lot of Netgear, D-Link, Trendnet, and the like in the past that were causing random issues on the network. I usually stick to Cisco or Sonicwall for firewalls/routers and Cisco or HP for switching.

I know that stuff is a lot more expensive, but in my experience you end up saving time and therefore money in the long run. We recently pulled a Cisco switch out of our environment that had an up time of 8 years. It had been on a UPS its entire life and was stuck in a back closet. The only reason for replacing it was that we ran out of ports after a building expansion.

2 Spice ups
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I loved Ubiquity APs until I had my first significant problem and needed help.

One of my best clients, (large church), had several AP-Pros, which worked very well for them except for Sunday services, when there’d be 200 smartphones in the church. People would report that their devices couldn’t get to the Internet. Some devices were just very slow. How many were working just fine? Who knew. I’d get a call. Monday moring about the problem, come out and troubleshoot and everything would work fine. AP channel seperation was fine. I wasn’t seeing any errors, the ISP connection was far from saturated. Thinking maybe the APs were overloaded, they purchased additional AP-Pros and upgraded the controller & AP firmware when a new version was available. The problem seemed to get worse. IIRC I found a thread on their support forum about others having similar problems, joined the discussion and discovered that due to feature creap in their AP firmware, there was a known problem in high-density environments. UB techs emailed me directly asking for packet traces and memory dumps and as much information as I could give them, which I happily provided. A few days later, I’d see a notice on the forum that a new “beta” version of firmware was available and would be all download it, try it and report back. I’d do that since there was nothing to loose, the wifi network was broken anyway (from the clients point of view). The symtpoms didn’t change, I’d report back, provide more packet traces, download more beta firmware, repeat… I did this for about 6 months or so until the client finally pulled the plug, after hearing from a member who happened to be the “CEO of a computer company” told them their needs would only truely be met with an enterprise class wifi system. So, that’s what they were going to do and they went out and began talking to vendors selling the “big iron” wifi systems.

I’d lost all credibility with the client. They think I’m a duffus. (I might be of course.) I have no idea if the UB firmware problem was ever resolved and it’s been over a year ago. Nobody from Ubiquity every got back to “ME” during any of this beta testing I was doing for them. I felt really left hanging out there on my own.

Right before the client pulled the plug, just days in fact, out of desperation, I back-rev’d the firmware in the AP-Pros to 3 year old firmware missing all of the “high-density” features we’d upgraded to get. I “think” stability has returned to the wifi network as a result, since the client never did purchase a new wifi system, but since I’ve been relegated to moron status with them, they don’t call me for help anymore. Losing that client really hurt.

I’ve not installed any Ubiquity APs since that time, other than in my own home, where they work great, but I don’t have high density needs. I have stayed in a few large hotel chains in the past year and noticed that they had dozens of UB APs and my Internet access sucked, the same symptoms as the church.

Support IS or was a huge problemfor Ubiquity. Maybe they’ve realized that is a weakness and fixed it. I was unaware of their paid-for-support options that I just read about and I’d still be skeptical about support until I learned otherwise.

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The key here is that Ubiquiti has its place, and that is NOT in high density areas. Most “normal” small offices UniFi is a great product, but as with any tool, it does have its place and sometimes there is a better tool for a different situation.

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I think the key here is to define the density above which Unifi gets swamped. I’ve got an installation in a retirement home where the AP in the dinner room easily handles 30-50 clients during meals without any apparent drops.
We had our own troubles in a church that can seat upwards of 1,000 in the sanctuary plus another few hundred throughout the building. Wound up ordering and installing KodaClouds and they’re amazing. Quite a bit more expensive, but you get a much more proactive controller and some beastly APs.
IMO, everything before the UAP-AC-Pros is a different class to what the new products are. The firmware seems extremely stable. Just went out to a (different) large church where we have a smaller number like 15 deployed yesterday for networking issues. Turns out 3 different tech companies had touched our network, as we’re just the wireless provider, and a reboot of the missing APs and fixing the naming scheme got them back online in <20 minutes.
Unifi support is slightly worse than OpenMesh in my experience, but it’s close enough. As others have said, we usually replace the AP first and then fight the RMA fight if there is something wrong.
I’m really liking the Koda stuff. They wound up allowing us to use a spare unit as an NFR after going through some channels and we can take it out and show the controller to clients. We’ve literally had no problems with it in the first 12 months of deployment, and I don’t think we’re going to see any others. Cost-wise it’s more Unifi than Meraki. Costs a bit more than replacing UAPs every 3 years, but they will ship you new APs, and they come pre-programmed to your account rather than messing with adoptions.
Speaking of, that’s where I see most of my Unifi issues. Not sure if it’s our internal network or the tech doing the work, but we have a non-standard deployment process. We host a CentOS VM specifically to act as our own private cloud controller, but when we adopt the APs on the internal network, they use the private ISP as the inform address. Which means there’s the extra step after the initial provision to re-inform to the URL that’s WAN-accessible.
I think their app is pretty top-notch for what I need it to do. I can walk around my deployments, blink lights, and make most changes from my phone and can flip back and forth between a WiFi analyzer to troubleshoot and confirm they’re operating as expected.
I’ve been trying to convince my boss(the owner) to try deploying the Ubiquiti firewalls, but it’s either Asus router or an Untangle UTM. Can’t win that fight, so I can’t speak to how well their ecosystem works, but I like that you can manage both devices from the same portal.
For small-ish 1-3 unit deployments they’re stupid easy. We keep a few on hand in a holding site and can literally just create a client site, set up the WLAN details, and have it ready to plug in within 10 minutes. The drawback to the non-Pro units is that they’re 24V PoE and that gets frustrating to manage on normal switches.
Our opinion is that the Unifi hardware is superior to the OMP stuff, but they lag in meshing capability, and the cloud controller isn’t quite as good. Overall we’ve noticed fewer problems and better throughput(Compared to OMP-2s, not quite a fair assessment I realize).