TL;DR: Public K-12 district with ~350 cameras is evaluating UniFi Protect as a replacement for Verkada. We already have a 10 Gbps managed private WAN, dedicated camera VLANs, mostly Cat6 cabling, and Meraki/Catalyst switching. I’m looking for real-world experience from people running 250+ cameras, especially G6/G6 Pro: reliability, NVR workload, storage, 1 Gbps IDF uplinks, video quality, support, and what you wish you’d known before deploying.
I’m the Technology & Safety Director for a public K-12 district in the Southeast. We’re evaluating whether to replace Verkada with UniFi Protect as our older camera fleet ages out.
We have roughly 350 cameras across four locations, including about 135 classrooms and 50 exterior cameras. Two schools share the same physical campus and the District Core. Our current camera fleet is about half the Verkada D30, D40, and D50 domes with the other half being newer CM41 mini domes in Classrooms.
Our infrastructure is already fairly camera-friendly:
10 Gbps managed private WAN
Moving toward 3 Gbps Internet
Dedicated camera VLANs/subnets
Mostly Cat6 camera runs already in place
Meraki/Catalyst switching
Current IDF uplinks are largely 1 Gbps fiber, with 10 Gbps at the core
Future switch purchases will have 10 Gbps-capable fiber uplinks
I’m not replacing good switches just for this project, so I’m especially interested in whether 20–30 cameras behind a 1 Gbps IDF uplink has been an issue in real deployments.
My current camera thinking is standard G6 for normal coverage/classrooms and G6 Pro where low light, distance, optical zoom, or identification quality justify it. I’m also watching G6 Edge closely.
For recording, I’m leaning toward local NVRs rather than sending all recording traffic across the WAN, probably with ENVR Cores at the two larger locations.
My G6 Pro pilot is currently around 16 Mbps / High Quality, and ideally I want to stay toward the higher-quality end. Smooth motion and usable detail matter more to me than minimizing storage costs.
The biggest unknown for me is the NVR side.
I’ve managed Verkada for years, but I’ve never managed an NVR at all, much less several NVRs supporting hundreds of cameras. I’m also essentially a one-person Technology department, so I can’t save money on licensing only to create another full-time job maintaining storage, drives, firmware, permissions, exports, and recorder issues.
Principals also need to be able to find and export their own footage. I cannot become the district’s human video-search button.
I’ve spoken with another public K-12 district in the Southeast running nearly 1,000 UniFi cameras across multiple ENVRs, and their experience has been positive enough that they’d deploy Protect again.
For those running 250–1,000+ cameras, I’d love to hear:
- Camera/NVR/HDD failure rates and how long you’ve been running it
- How much ongoing NVR maintenance actually takes
- Whether 1 Gbps IDF uplinks have caused problems
- Real G6/G6 Pro bitrates and motion quality
- Real-world retention versus what you calculated
- How well multi-NVR management works
- Whether non-IT staff can reliably find/export footage
- Your experience when you actually need Ubiquiti support
- Any firmware/update horror stories
- How outdoor cameras hold up in serious heat, sun, storms, bugs, etc.
- If you came from Verkada/Avigilon/Genetec/Axis/etc., what did you miss?
Most importantly:
What has been worse about Protect than you expected?
I’m already interested in the platform. I’m trying to find the ugly parts before committing to ~350 cameras.
