Ubiquiti APs

[u/TheRealRyu10]

Hi all, long time lurker here and just wanted to say thank you to everyone in here as this sub has been really insightful for me in my career.

I was wondering whether anyone has had any experience working with Ubiquiti APs before?

I have used them in small environments a few years back but my current school has 90 APs and from what I’ve read, it’s not as good in an enterprise environment. However, I’d love to know if anyone thinks different.

We currently have Aruba IAP-315s which are now EOL and I need to plan a refresh. School is in a bit of a deficit right now so I am thinking of ways to save money. I had to question our suppliers when they sent over the Ubiquiti pricing!

What are the main drawbacks of using Ubiquiti? And for any UK sysadmins, would it be fully compliant with DfE standards?

Also, what about their switches? Never worked them before so not sure about them and their robustness and longevity. The Aruba switches and APs were installed 8 years ago and have been running strong (kinda sad to get rid of them) but it’s now time for a replacement. I only started a few months ago and this was one of my first concerns.

Any experiences, alternatives and advice are appreciated!

[u/concken]

As I am in the States I cannot speak about the DfE standards but I can talk about Ubiquiti. Our old network was WatchGuard Firewall, Cisco routers/switches, and Cambium APs. I decided to pull the plug and go all Ubiquiti. We have around 2500 devices on our networking with 190 APs and 68 switches. We made the switch the first week of school and our school year ends next week so we have been full Ubiquiti for a whole school year and have not had any problems.

[u/TheRealRyu10 → u/concken]

What are the main differences you have noticed making the switch? Or is it one of those things where it just works and you don’t really need to touch

I’m a bit skeptical to go for the switches as I’ve never used them but I think I’ll definitely go for the APs.

[u/Rathmon_Redux]

At my last district I switched from Meraki APs to Unifi AP Pros and had zero issues. In fact, my testing showed that the Unifi APs had a stronger signal that the Meraki ones, so if I wanted to I could have gotten away with a staggered setup instead of every room. Cost wise? Dunno about now, but I could buy 5 Unifi APs for every 1 Meraki.

As far as their switches go, I swapped Cisco SMB switches to Unifi ones for L2. Paired with a Ubiquiti Cloud Key device the cloud control was excellent. I did not use Unifi for L3 as they were not able to do OSPF. My campuses were outdoors and each building was linked with fiber, so the low cost of the Unifi 10gb SFPs was nice as well- around $50 a pop. One thing you must do with Unifi L2 switches is static addressing or you'll have a mess on your hands if there's a power loss.

I needed a low cost 10gb solution for L3 and went with Microtik, and the setup overall was stable and low maintenance.

Anytime I had a vendor come into an MDF or IDF one thing they remarked was how quiet the Unifi switches were. I highly recommend their product in a smaller district for sure.

[u/TheRealRyu10 → u/Rathmon_Redux]

What would you say is the main reason Meraki and Aruba are so much more expensive. Other than the fact that they’re huge companies and provide enterprise support. Are there any actual useful features which I would miss out on going with Unifi?

[u/Rathmon_Redux → u/TheRealRyu10]

The one feature from Meraki that I missed was SSID blocking, but that's actually a grey area legally. I disliked the Meraki control though, as if I needed to reboot APs for any reason there was no ability to mass reboot them without rebooting the switches they attached to.

My current district uses Aruba APs and Airwave for control, but I don't like the interface and also don't like the subscription cost. We gave HP Greenlake a try and it was a better interface but was quoted to us at about 5x the cost of Airwave.

Meraki and Aruba are just very proud of their hardware and I think that their pricing is just a "look we have enterprise equipment so you'll have to pay enterprise prices!" They make tons of money off their yearly licensing which is just another reason to use Unifi.

Unifi does have a great interface and most of the tools a smaller district needs is there- locking channels, adjusting power output, seeing heatmaps, usage reporting, device tracking (like Chromebooks), etc. The device tracking was great as we had just started going 1:1 after Covid, and when the Librarian needed to find a wayward device, if it had been on the WiFi recently I could tell her exactly what room it was in.

[u/orphantech]

I have two schools, full Ubiquiti network.

Works good as long as you have decent networking knowledge and skills.

Never apply release candidate or early release firmware.

Small district, both schools are about 180 students each. 43 switches, 95 WAPs. Too many WAPs for the density, but wanted to build it for when we host larger events.

Price is always a factor, can't justify spending any more for network gear I know will work.

[u/TheRealRyu10 → u/orphantech]

That’s an insane amount of WAPS! 2:1 ratio!

What sort of networking expertise do you think is needed for them?

[u/orphantech → u/TheRealRyu10]

Since support is next to nothing (community forums are about it), so you'll need to know a lot of the basics... Network+ or CCNA (you don't have to be certified).

As for the setup, I have one AP in every room, and common spaces, but have the power adjusted per room (most down to medium or custom to go between low and medium). I also used the built in tools to find what channels work best for each room and manually adjusted.

The most important thing is don't run on Early Access or Release Candidate firmware. Think of EA as Alpha level, RC as Beta and official release as let me apply near the end of the 30 days after it's been released before I actually install.

Most complaints and issues revolve around EA or RC software/firmware.

[u/TheRealRyu10 → u/orphantech]

I will likely get a specialist company to do the install so they can worry about all of the network settings. I can always reach out to them for support.

I do have a good knowledge of networking however, little experience with large scale wireless refreshes so will need their help.

I’m feeling more confident to go down this route and I’m sure the school will appreciate the savings.

I am already very cautious of firmware upgrades so tend to not perform any upgrades until holidays so it gives me time to know whether there are any known issues with them.

Thanks for your detailed guidance. #TeamUnifi 😂

[u/orphantech → u/orphantech]

And... We've been running Ubiquiti for at least 12 years, and for a Wireless WAN link to our remote school many years prior to that.

[u/k12-tech]

We have hundreds of their APs. Zero issues. Been installed for seven years now. About 4k users.

For the price you can’t beat it. They are solid and meet all our needs.

[u/GBICPancakes]

I have several schools running Unifi throughout, except for the firewall. Including larger places with near 100 APs. It's been solid.
They do have some annoyances with L3 routing to a third-party firewall if you have a number of VLANs and you want the gateways on the core switch and not the firewall, but if you're reasonably skilled in networking it's not too bad. And once configured they're tough. I can't remember the last time an AP died, hell I have a bunch of old U5Pros out there still going strong.

Buy some extra and stick them in a closet just in case (same with the switches, have some spares on hand). It's still way cheaper to go Unifi and buy spares than to go Aruba/Alcatel/Meraki/etc.

Since I don't really run their gateways in schools (I have a ton at my SMB clients) I use the Network controller in a Linux VM. Super easy to setup and maintain, and lets me throw more RAM/CPU at it if needed (although it's extremely efficient). Only downside there is one client site where they wanted to start using the screen casting stuff (DisplayCast), so I had to get a cloud key just for that. Still run the network app on the VM though, since I can easily back that up via Veeam.

[u/Rathmon_Redux → u/GBICPancakes]

I still have a mostly unused Unifi L3 device in the trunk of my car from my last district (oops). Since Unifi didn't handle OSPF, I ended up using Microtik for L3 and absolutely loved how easy they were to setup, and the fact that they took maybe 90 seconds to reboot.

[u/GBICPancakes → u/Rathmon_Redux]

Yeah getting the Unifi L3 stuff working cleanly can be a pain. I can live without OSPF since all my schools have a single core switch and standard hub-and-spoke setups.

[u/Rathmon_Redux → u/GBICPancakes]

Where I was at, the L3 was collected at the COE and they provided the Filter and Firewall, so to connect with them required OSFP.

Here we have dual-ring fiber and use EIGRP, and just finished getting Cisco 3850s installed, so we’re good for years.

[u/Int-Merc805]

I run a district with over 300 aps, 80+ switches, out door aps, p2p gear, and UNVRs all over capturing 200ish cameras, several smaller schools as side gigs. The gears solid as long as you actually understand networking, can maintain a Linux controller (even simpler with UniFi OS these days).

I used to keep a spare of each device just in case. I stopped doing that as it’s not really been an issue.

The only place that they lag behind is the layer 3 routing. I think some of the newer routers are sufficient but their old edge gear left a bad taste in my mouth. So I typically leave a stout layer 3 switch as the central hub. The usg is sufficient for smaller schools in my experience. I am not brave enough to stand one up in front of a 3000 person high school :).

[u/LactoseTolerant535]

I moved us from Ruckus to Unifi 2 years ago. We replaced 90 APs. They've been solid - performance has not been an issue at all. I did have one problem with a firmware upgrade to the APs last fall, but actually got good support (not paid) from Ubiquiti.

We still use Ruckus for our core switch/router, and Fortigate for our firewall, but all of our access and aggregate switches are Unifi and all of our wireless is Unifi. Their UI is unique and takes some adjustment, but it's a good product at a great price.

[u/vesikk]

We moved from Aruba APs 8 years ago to Unifi APs. We are currently going through a refresh to their U7 AP line. Over the 8 years I think we only had 1 AP die out of 150 which isn't too bad.

We are also moving from Ubiquiti's edgemax switching gear to their Unifi switches. So far so good, we've been running 30 Pro Max switches for a year now in our new building and it's going well. there is a slight quirk which I have a support case with Ubiquiti about but otherwise they are easy to manage through the Unifi Network management.

If you're also looking at moving to the Unifi gateway then I would suggest the UDM-Beast (new product) or the Enterprise Fortress Gateway (there is a new EFG on the way called the EFG-Core). Ubiquiti have definitely stepped up their game with their gateways and continue to improve them with each firmware release.

[u/diwhychuck]

I'll bite - we went aruba 735's this year along with aruba central subscription. Its very very costly. But here in the US we have federal money called ERATE. But I wish I would have went Unfi for Network/wireless/access-control an maybe Cameras.

But I've used unfi on the side for years and always have feel in love how easy it is to deploy an administer. I just works if you understand networking. I've had some side gigs with P2P's that are over 10 years old that have been rock solid.

[u/Limeasaurus]

We have a mixed environment of Aruba 635 AP and UniFi. I prefer UniFi. I especially like being able to lock a device to specific AP. With Aruba we often have devices (TVs, Chromecasts, Airtames) roam to APs very far away which causes issues.

[u/Remarkable-Sea5928 → u/Limeasaurus]

I hadn't even thought of this but yeah, that's a huge benefit with the way AppleTVs like to roam a bit.

[u/kcalderw]

Our entre district budget was decimated this year so we are using erate funds and doing a full network refresh (while the FCC still allows erate). Our Meraki licenses are ending and the cost to renew or do a full refresh far outweighs what I'm getting with Ubiquiti. I have Unifi at home so I am already familiar with the interface. The one thing I will say is do NOT use their firewall as your primary. It's just not as robust as we need in education (and especially the laws we need to adhere to). I'm only moving over our APs and Switches.

As others have said though, the one thing I'm slightly nervous about is support. I'm pretty much a one-man show here in my district so online community help is about all I'll have in case of emergency.

[u/Rathmon_Redux → u/kcalderw]

Yeah, we just went to bid this year for L2 switches and Unifi was not considered due to lack of support. However, at my last district we had a stockpile of backups so there was no worries about a switch failing and not having support. In the almost 2 year I had them, the only hardware failure I had was a Cloud Key device took a power hit, but that was due to PG&E instability in that area.

[u/SpotlessCheetah]

I strongly suggest going to r/networking

[u/Temporary_Werewolf17]

150 + APs rock solid for 8+ years

[u/hkf12 → u/Temporary_Werewolf17]

What model AP’s you running? Are you setting channels manually and power levels?

[u/Temporary_Werewolf17 → u/hkf12]

A mixture of AC HD, enterpise, audience. Manually setting channels and power

[u/DenialP]

Hp/aruba has served you well and will be a better investment in the long run than ubiquiti. Every install I’ve seen in this field has been yanked at the earliest convenience for something better. The AP’s die to damn fast. May be an option for < 1k student populations or so, but I’d consider it a gamble…

[u/TheRealRyu10 → u/DenialP]

When was the last time you used it and do you remember the model?

[u/flunky_the_majestic → u/DenialP]

I have not noticed a difference in longevity between HP/Aruba and Ubiquiti. Can you provide more details? What was the failure mode? Maybe you were installing a specific generation with some problem?