We have one or two UniFi switches, but they don't really compete with the Ciscos. It's a nice environment as far as keeping track of things and being able to manage ports, turn off rogue users, and stuff like that. The access points have been pretty convenient compared to Meraki, Lucent, Cisco, or any of the other bigger vendors that I used to deal with for other consulting projects.
Ubiquiti is one step above the consumer level. They cost a little bit more, but they just seem to be drop-dead reliable, and they're keeping up with the latest standards. Their latest versions of access points are all Wi-Fi 6, and they don't take very much power when there aren't a lot of users.
It's really easy to build one configuration and just apply it to new devices.
It's a check mark box: Do I want this to be the staff VLAN, or the public VLAN, or the Voice over IP VLAN, or the security VLAN, or the house wiring VLAN, or the building logistics VLAN? You just check things off and then you make groups, so if you click on it, it applies all the appropriate things automatically. It makes it very easy.
This solution is good for the prosumer, small office, medium office, under 500 people range, but probably over 50 people and maybe distributed around five or 10 sites. That's a pretty good sweet spot as far as the price for the equipment and the configurability, and it's just drop-dead reliable. It's been boring, which is what I love because I don't get any calls in the middle of the night that something isn't working.
Ubiquiti tends to end-of-life things faster than other companies do. Cisco tends to be in the 8-, 10-, 12-year time frame, and Ubiquiti tends to be in the 4- or 5-year time frame. If you buy Ubiquiti, you'll probably need to replace it in a period of time, but it's going to work flawlessly unless it gets hit with lightning. They don't survive lightning hits very well, but that's what insurance policies are for.
The stability is rock solid.
It's scalable. I wouldn't want to scale it up to 500 nodes per site. You probably need a bigger management system than what they have. There's a tune toward maybe 100 to 200 devices, and you can use search terms and write custom scripts to pull out particular variables that you want. If I want to have a plot of the number of access points with high re-transmission rates over the last month, that doesn't come by default out of the box. I had to write a script for that, but it was pretty easy. It's normal IT stuff. Every case is different.
For the companies that have 5-10 physical sites and 50-200 networking devices – not user devices – this is fine. I would say under 1,000 or 2,000 user devices but under 500 or 200 network devices. This is the sort of sweet spot for that, and it worked out really well for us. We looked at other options, and we just decided to go with this because it was working so well on a couple of our sites.
I have worked with Meraki, Lucent, and Cisco.
Compared to Cisco, unless you're going to have tens of thousands of devices, or you have a budget that nobody cares about, Ubiquiti is much easier to set up. It's not like the smaller things like the Netgears and D-Links where you need a configuration for each device. If lightning takes out a site and you have to rebuild that site, you have to go and rebuild each device.
With Ubiquiti, I have a backup copy in the Cloud somewhere. I just download that, blast it onto the new controller, drop the new controller in, and replace any of the wiring that got burned and put in new access points. I can be back up and running in half an hour to two hours. It's amazingly easy because it's all centrally managed.
Once you've learned how to do a Ubiquiti setup, then everything else is like a rubber stamp. It's very trivial. I just copy a configuration and paste it into a new controller, and I'm up and running in half an hour. I can bring up five APs or 60 or 70 APs and if the wiring is done and we just have to go place the APs, that takes up the most time. It's physically climbing up the ladder and screwing the thing into the wall.
For everything else with the software configuration, they do the auto-learn. They pick up their own address pool, and we're running them on separate VLANs from everything else. There's management VLAN that takes care of setting them up and pushing configurations out and doing updates. But there are the user VLANs. That's what people think that they're talking to when they are connecting with their cell phones or their laptops. That's all separate for security reasons.
For maintenance, we have just one guy who takes care of terminations and hanging APs. He does a lot of other things as well with DC Cat5 and Cat6 wiring and low voltage stuff. I'm the only one who does the software end of the management. So, it's really just two guys.
Realistically, I don't have to do this. It's not something I even look at every day because it sends me a text message when there's something horrible going on. It sends me an email status message at 1:00 a.m. every day.
I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.
Cisco might be just one point higher, but twice as expensive. If you really want to save money, then you're getting down into the quality of five or six when you're talking about D-Link and Netgear.