call me bitter, but after spending many years working with the unifi line from ubiquiti i wouldnt trust this crap… damn people finish one product before jumping on the next. they have some good ideas but its always with terrible implementation… and do not ever even try to use their support site.
their products always seem ‘close to finished’ but never fully functional or polished.
I dumped all of my unifi gear for ruckus 3-4y ago and I’m very happy with that choice. I used to have random unifi incidents every couple of weeks that required rebooting all of their hardware and/or the controller container - by contrast I think I’ve had to reboot my Ruckus APs exactly once since 2019.
That definitely used to happen, but not so much anymore. That being said, their software is still buggy, and I don’t wouldn’t touch any of their products that do L3 routing, as they’re still shit.
Here’s another fun bit: for quite some time their WPA Enterprise+Kerberos handling was badly broken as well. Every 10th or so login on that SSID managed to punt the client over onto the native VLAN for the AP’s management rather than the VLAN that the Kerberos ticket supplied for the user’s credentials. I reported this one and they gave the organizational equivalent of a shrug. Unifi! That’s about when I dropped them for good.
Thanks for pointing out ruckus, didn’t know them. Their product line is a little confusing, need to study it a bit to figure out the difference
For AC APs check out the r510, r610 and r710. For AX look at the r650 and r750.
Focus on the models that support the Unleashed firmware unless you plan to buy a ZoneDirector box.
Looks like the r750 has the Unleashed, but the r650 does not. Weirdly the r750 has only 6, but the 650 has 6e - the r650 being a better model overall, its strange they numbered it lower than the 750. The r770 has Unleashed, and is wifi 7. I’m mostly looking to get my home lit up, so I don’t need something insane, but with multiple floors it will likely require a couple devices.
Some of those specs are off, I think you might have been looking at the r560 or another 6E AP by accident.
The r650 has unleashed available, several friends are using them with unleashed at home, and no 6E support.
None of the r6x0 models support 6GHz, afaik that’s only available on the r560, r760 and r770 and of those only the r770 supports unleashed (it’s also tremendously expensive.)
The model distribution for unleashed support is a little weird, the entire xx10 series (r510, r610, r710, etc) is supported, along with the xx50s (r650, r750) and a smattering of other r7x0 models (r720, r770, etc.) A few mid-generation r7x0 models exist but don’t support unleashed, these tend to either use draft WiFi spec hardware or non-ARM SoC platforms. The r560 and r760 support WiFi 6E but are non-unleashed models.
If you don’t care about AX or don’t want to spend too much r610s and r710s are really reasonably priced on eBay, I’ve seen plenty of r610s for ~$50 and they’re absolute workhorses.
For a multi-story home install you’ll probably want 1-2 r650s (or r550s) for solid AX coverage throughout the house. I’d start with one in the middle of the second or third floor and see how coverage looks. If coverage is insufficient move the AP to the middle of the top floor and add one more in the middle of the ground floor and you should be set. The way the coverage patterns on these work they benefit from being installed on the ceiling, I think you have something like 1/3 coverage behind the AP (above, if it’s mounted on the ceiling) compared to what you have in front. The radiation diagrams on the model data sheets are worth a look.
If you’re trying to cover the entire house with one single AP in the middle I’d look at the higher spec models (610/650/710/750) rather than the r5x0s, the r6/r7 models handle density better than the r5s. I wouldn’t be too surprised if one r650 covered the entire house, ruckus beam forming is really good compared to the competition.
Still waiting for an updated USG. Hoping this might fit the bill but need to look into it further. I have no need for the AP portion of this.
If it was available a few weeks ago, would have bought it. Bought a glowing egg instead. I’ve got more than 10 sites setup for my homes and they all just work. I’m willing to bet those that have constant issues either don’t set them up properly, or are doing super weird configurations. They are consumer grade routers. You need a pfsense box or something if you want real firewall and routing capabilities.
Treat them as such, and be happy. If you want to use every feature they claim to have, you’re going to have a bad time. The value is in the aesthetics of a good wireless access point and wired switch with remote access and management. That’s it.
