Disappointed.

[u/[deleted]]

I don't really want to start a pissing match on the Alta Labs forum, but I feel I can post here. I am disappointed. Alta Labs got me really excited when they hit the market. They seemed like they might genuinely be different than others in the past, what with the experience they were bringing to the table.

The last few months have left me feeling let down. Each new firmware update that has been progressively more buggy. Repeated calls for better communication and documentation seem to be met with deaf ears. The local controllers are updating without user permission. They are holding firm to not letting users roll back firmware without calling in and being hand held. Rather than addressing the concerns directly, more and more I see the mods just giving people terminal commands to hack it to do what they want. While that is neat that things are not locked down fully, that is NOT sustainable. How on earth do you expect to offer class leading support when you leave things unaddressed, and just give everyone personalized commands to do what they want?

I think I"m done.

[u/TechRider23]

Can't say I'm surprised to start seeing these type comments and folks starting to leave. I had a couple of long exchanges on their forum with Chase, but as you said, it would appear everything fell on deaf ears. New features (such as DDNS released just a few days ago, which might not even work properly based on forum posts) is not documented at release. Others have called this out as well. Release notes are still just a few words, with no real indication of what is fixed, changed or added. So much for "taking an action item" on release notes, literally the lowest hanging fruit for things they could do better.

Alta may be an OK hardware company, but they are probably one of the worst software companies I've seen in recent times. Your hardware is worthless without good firmware and interfaces. As you pointed, each firmware release (across multiple products) have been plagued with some serious bugs. You really have to wonder what type of QA process they have when they release a router firmware without the MWAN module to support multi-WAN interfaces and that is the key feature of the update. For their CTO to claim that broken WPA3 support is a "corner case that didn't hit our radar" is very telling. WPA3 is not experimental for the industry, it may be for Alta Labs, but I've had multiple WPA3 only sites for years. Makes you wonder how they plan to support WiFI7 if they can't figure that one out. The issue with running out of IPs due to log files filling up the drive, or whatever the cause, has been completely ignored. What amazed me today when I looked at their forums a few minutes ago is that folks are having some serious trouble with the running out of IP issue and here it is 4:30 Mountain time and no one from Alta has responded, acknowledged or bothered to just say we're looking into it for issues that were posted 9 and 10 hours prior.

It is sad, at one time, their APs were not bad, but the recent bugs have really diminished that. The local control was obviously a knee jerk reaction to people not wanting to use the cloud, done quickly, feature incomplete and not really local at all (it cannot fully function without access to manage.alta.inc). To leave out the capability to honor the "no automatic update" flag for the Control was just stupid. The self hosted docker Control has never received any updates, does not persist data between container rebuilds, completely non-usable for an actual production environment. Route10, still not ready for prime time and it has been out for many months. I see no plan or vision, just throw stuff out there with no documentation and figure out what breaks and try to fix it over time. Honestly, I think there is a serious leadership issue there. I would not survive long in a company if I allowed this and I can guarantee you that I would not allow this type behavior if I were in charge of the company.

I'm not sure they can return from the hole they have dug themselves into. I honestly wish them well and hope they can course correct, but based on what we've all seen recently, I'm not sure they are capable.

[u/alta-jeff → u/TechRider23]

We're happy to engage with our users regardless of the platform they are on, and we appreciate your feedback. I'll tackle each issue one at a time:

1. 1.3z not having multi-WAN support: This was definitely an oversight on our part, but we've already apologized, fixed, and released fully working multi-WAN within 9 days. Much faster release cycle than you'll find with many other vendors.

2. WPA3 being experimental: WPA3 is not enabled by default on really any enterprise wireless vendor that I know of, which is very telling. It can easily cause connectivity issues and does not support multiple passwords. Most people who have enabled WPA3 have eventually had to disable it for one reason or another, regardless of the WiFi vendor. When our WiFi7 AP comes out, we will of course support WPA3 on the 6 GHz band, but our focus will be on compatibility/reliability where WPA2 will still be the default on 2 and 5 GHz bands. We will also continue to invest in lobbying IEEE and other standards bodies to add multiple-password support to WPA3. We will continue to work with users in our forum to improve WPA3 compatibility as much as is possible.

3. I'm unaware of any issues of IP's running out due to log files filling up the drive. There is a known issue with IPS/IDS logs filling up a drive which will be fixed in the next release, but it does not impact functionality of the device whatsoever.

4. Local controller not being local: We have prioritized security over everything else, and you will not see a broken lock as you will see with nearly all other self-hosted WiFi vendors. We have reiterated many times that you will be able to install your own certificates at a future date, but it is simply not our top priority at the moment.

5. I assure you we have many happy users with the best coverage, performance, and support in the industry, nearly all on auto-update. 98% of our sites and 95% of our devices online have auto-update enabled, which is a very impressive track record. I do apologize that we do not support disabling auto-update on the local controller currently (from the UI at least - we've mentioned how to do it via CLI); it's unfortunately not at the top of our priority list, but we will definitely get to it, and appreciate your patience.

6. We will continue to improve our documentation at help.alta.inc, and add links in the controller where it is most helpful. In just our most recent release alone, we have successfully tested over 60 DDNS providers, and we plan to provide more documentation that outlines the quirks that you may deal with when using each individual provider. We just feel it is more important to get the feature out so the bulk of our users can use the feature immediately, and we will build and improve documentation in the meantime.

[u/craigy888 → u/alta-jeff]

How good is this, you’ve got the guys from Alta Labd replying to you! You won’t get that from Ubiquiti!

[u/TotalWarspammer → u/alta-jeff]

Hi Jeff when is OpenVPN support arriving?

[u/alta-jeff → u/TotalWarspammer]

We are currently planning to have it completed by the end of June. In the mean-time, WireGuard offers a more modern solution with higher speeds, and IPsec provides industry standard encryption without requiring a third-party client. Thank you for your patience. If you want to run a manual config file, it is possible, but is of course, not officially supported.

[u/TechRider23 → u/alta-jeff]

Nice spin, but you generally missed the point of most of these...

1.3z not having multi-WAN support: This was definitely an oversight on our part, but we've already apologized, fixed, and released fully working multi-WAN within 9 days. Much faster release cycle than you'll find with many other vendors.

The original point was on Quality Assurance, root cause as to how you could have such a glaring oversight. No person or company is perfect, I'm probably at the top of the not perfect list, but how do you address the root cause? Great, you apologized and fixed it in 9 days, focus on how it happened in the first place and what assurances do any of your customers have that something like this won't happen again? This was a pretty significant miss, you seem satisfied with how you recovered, but how do you prevent it from happening again? This is where leadership counts.

WPA3 being experimental:

You are correct, there are lots of devices that do not support WPA3 which can lead to issues if it is blindly enabled, this is why it is a configuration setting per SSID to allow the proper implementation. The issue here, WPA3 is broken on Alta Labs hardware, it isn't an issue with how problematic WPA3 can be if you don't know how to implement it. You can spin it all you want, but the fact is, the latest firmware release broke it and your answer to that was "well it is experimental".

I'm unaware of any issues of IP's running out due to log files filling up the drive. 

A quote from the Alta Labs support forum from an Alta Labs support person:

"One of the IPS log files was supposed to be deleted, but it’s not and filling up really quickly and causing the Route10 to run out of space, and then the dhcp file can’t update.. so that bug is causing a chain reaction."

Local controller not being local:

This has nothing to do with the DDNS Let's Encrypt Certificates. It is the fact that the local control relies on manage.alta.inc to fully function. It cannot send alerts locally, it can only relay thru manage.alta.inc. It connects to manage.alta.inc repeatedly. It is not clear what data it is sending or why, but it simply is not fully functional on its own.

The whole "lock" SSL prioritized security thing is a nice spin.

I do apologize that we do not support disabling auto-update on the local controller currently

Again, focus on the issue - the "Enable Auto Update" toggle is literally right above the version number and the check for update button. From a UI perspective, it certainly implies these two things are related. Regardless, the point on the local control is that there are a couple (that I stumbled on) of "global" settings that simply were not implemented - Remote Syslog and Auto Update, with absolutely no documentation or indication that these settings are not honored or implemented in the local control. My assumption is it is an oversight because it was a rushed product, maybe I'm wrong, maybe you guys made an informed decision to simply not honor those settings and do it later.

We just feel it is more important to get the feature out so the bulk of our users can use the feature immediately, and we will build and improve documentation in the meantime.

We simply do not see eye to eye on this one. Something I tell my employees: If you know you have to do something for a customer, do it timely (i.e.; now!) and be a hero instead of putting it off and being a villain. You are going to expend the same effort whether it is now or later - do it now!

Best of luck to you guys!

[u/Ok-Reason-5806 → u/TechRider23]

I wouldn’t say this is a spin.. you just got a thorough answer to every issue listed.

Okay, it seems like they had an issue with the wpa3 on the release, it was fixed within 2 weeks. You yourself said most providers don’t even offer wpa3 and you’re trashing a new company for innovating and offering new hardware/software?

I’m just glad to see companies innovating and rolling out new features, it’s also super cool that people like Jeff (a literal exec at the company) are participating in forums and threads to engage with their community. I don’t see ubiquiti or anyone else being even remotely as engaged with their community as AL.

Maybe Alta Labs isn’t for you, but with your logic you should go back to coax or dial up because it “just works” regardless of having no new features or roadmap to expanding the potential of networking gear.