Unifi AP AC PRO

[Lazybones]

Well to add to my Unifi Edge router I have picked up a Unifi AP AC Pro.

So far it seems good.. Most of my clients seem to max out their speed when near it.. I am going to have to bring home a more powerful unit for testing but I have hit well over 200Mbits with it which is nice. Speed drops off at range as expected but I find the connection more stable.

Even with poor placement right now it reaches all parts of my house on the 2.4 Ghz band at least and 5Ghz for most.

It support Band steering so it can try and Force some dumb clients to move from 2.4 to 5 when they have a good signal. This is important as I really only want to run one SSID, I was having lots of issues running Separate or merged SSIDs before.

I may get a second one to get proper 5Ghz speeds throughout the house but I am going to experiment with placement. Since it is POE I can place it in several more ideal and central locations if I run the cable.

[Tom]

Yeah, I've found it pretty darn good. I just wish the Canadian Dollar was closer to parity, as the new AP AC Pro is HALF the cost (in usd) of the older Unifi Pro. It's pretty rediculous. Unfortunately due to the echange rate, I ended up spending about the same for my AP AC Pro as my old AP Pro. Which sucks.

I found a pretty good central place, middle of my hallway, with direct line of sight to the couch, and not too many obstructions anywhere else, except maybe the bathroom. lol. But signal in there is good too, even through 1-2 walls. I get signal down the street

[Lazybones]

I have determined that I have some form of super wifi obstruction up stairs... Probably a combination of plumbing and duct work, I do have stable 2.4 now at least in the blocked area, and 5 nearly everywhere.

I have moved the AP to the wall on the main stairwell in the middle of the house, need to go find a white network cable, the gray really stands out on the wall..

Going to see how stable this is over time, might still end up with two to get perfect 5Ghz in the house but the band steering and min signal strength settings really seem to improve stability.. Just need to make sure you don't get too aggressive with the min signal settings or your devices pop on and off frequently. The nice thing however is that devices that loose 5GHz and go back to 2.4 do eventually move back up to 5Ghz.. With my Asus router they all sort of just pooled on 2.4 eventually.

[Lazybones]

Well after purchasing some extra tools like feed tape and cutting one hole in the wall to feed past a fire block, I now have 2 UAP-AC-PROs in my house.. 1 on the ceiling on the top floor and one on the ceiling in the basement. Full 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz coverage in the house, all of my mobile devices show full bars EVERYWHERE. I actually have the 2.4Ghz radios set to their lowest setting as both APs essentially cover the whole house on that band.. the 5Ghz ones nicely fade in the middle.

The unifi controller software is also now up to version 5 which brings new firmware and a mobile friendly interface so it is super easy to do config changes while testing single.

There are a few disappointments I found with these devices so far however:
- The AUTO power settings do not actually AUTO anything (like higher end enterprise systems), they are the same as HIGH... According to the forms there are more placeholders for the future... If you do a multi AP deploy you should do some manual power level setting to reduce overlap..
- Auto channel only changes channels during power on, there is no SMART check between APs, again it is on the road map but nothing like higher end enterprise systems
- Doing a WiFi band survey takes the AP offline (not too bad if you have more than one and enough over lap but still)
- DFS channel support is not yet available in the Canada / US firmware but coming soon.. This is important especially for 5Ghz AC as 80Mhz wide channel modes take up a lot of channel space.

Over all I am seeing amazingly stable / consistent connections to these APs. Speed test wise I don't have an equivalently fast to device to test with... Using my Asus USB-AC56R stick I was able to hit about 200Mbit/s - 250Mbit/s which is in line with what smallnetbuilder got with that USB stick in their tests.

I plan on bringing a faster device home to test with.. However not that many devices ship with a 3 stream capable adaptor other than Macbooks... I think the surface 3 does as well but I will have to double check.

[Melbosa]

I can't give the devices enough praise as I have used them at client sites for years.  Ubiquiti makes a very solid product IMO.

[Lazybones]

I can't give the devices enough praise as I have used them at client sites for years.  Ubiquiti makes a very solid product IMO.

Ya they seem to give a lot of bang for the buck for small to larger ish deploys on a small budget.

The management UI is super clean and easy.

They market themselves as enterprise however so I thought I would point out some of the gaps. I have seen more than a few surprised posts from techs refreshing from Cisco gear or others to it shocked that auto power does nothing and that site survey takes the units offline.

Still tremendous value considering the price range. I am so happy to have my WiFi separated from my routing at home now.

[Thorin]

I can't give the devices enough praise as I have used them at client sites for years.  Ubiquiti makes a very solid product IMO.

Ya they seem to give a lot of bang for the buck for small to larger ish deploys on a small budget.

The management UI is super clean and easy.

They market themselves as enterprise however so I thought I would point out some of the gaps. I have seen more than a few surprised posts from techs refreshing from Cisco gear or others to it shocked that auto power does nothing and that site survey takes the units offline.

Still tremendous value considering the price range. I am so happy to have my WiFi separated from my routing at home now.

Glad to hear you've got it all set up and working.  So you have a separate router, then?  And are the APs hardwired to the router through the walls or something?

[Lazybones]

Glad to hear you've got it all set up and working.  So you have a separate router, then?  And are the APs hardwired to the router through the walls or something?

If you follow my other separate post I purchased an Edge Router Lite a while ago.


So currently my setup looks like this.

Duel phone lines--->Smart/RG Modem in bridge mode-->Edgerouter lite (PPOE to ISP/DHCP/DNS/Firewall/Routing)--->Switches (one is POE to power the APs)->Devices and APs

The APs are managed by the Unifi Controller software that I run on a VM on one of my servers, you can now set them up just by iOS app if you want but you loose monitoring history features.

The POE switch is optional but nicer than sticking the POE power injectors in, I picked up a D-LINK DGS-1100-08P which is a very affordable POE switch that supports the power output needed for for these APs.. Note that there are SEVERAL POE standards so check carefully.

Other than the wired computers in the basement everything else in my house is WiFi so problems with Wifi where becoming my main IT problem at home.. 3 iPads, 2 iPhones, 2 SmartTVs, Xbox 360, Wifi home automation devices. The iPads and SmartTVs do a lot of video streaming so disconnects are bad, also dips in signal quality cause buffering. I was also finding that even with 6GB data plans on our phones the Wife and I would go over some months, mostly attributed to not using WiFi when home because of stability / coverage issues.

Separating the router from WiFi was also nice as when I tinker with setting up servers etc most changes do not cause a device restart, previously the whole WiFi router would reboot taking down local wifi and the internet until it finished booting.

Edit: to use these APs you could always just turn WiFI OFF on an existing combo router and still use it... I just decided to up the level of hardware all around.