A number of responses to your post claim disappointingly low throughput on the Ubiquiti access points. Having just installed one myself, I was also initially disappointed...until I discovered that the default settings limit peak speeds to about 25% of what's possible with these Ubiquity APs.

I have the UAP-AC-Pro model; two configuration changes from the default yielded speeds as fast as any other access point I've encountered: 500+ Mbits up and down, as measured with iperf3 to a (wired) local box.

There may be good reasons for these defaults, but, briefly, the access point is factory set to use 40MHz channel widths for 802.11ac, and to reserve radio bandwidth for a wireless uplink. To resolve:

1) Update the 5GHz radio to use an 80 MHz channel width (really, two channels); this doubles effective throughput. In the Unifi interface, choose your AP from the devices menu, go to Config > Radios > Radio 5G and choose "VHT80" from the dropdown for channel width.

2) Uncheck the "Enable connectivity monitor and wireless uplink" box in the Unifi main "Site" settings panel; this also nearly doubled sustained throughput, though unfortunately it means your access point doesn't check whether it's disconnected from the Internet. (This may or may not be a problem for you. For me, it means my Internet is down, and it's not useful for my AP to know this too.)

I'm posting this in the hopes that it spares a few hours of Googling for someone else who, like me, was initially disappointed by Ubiquiti's access point speeds!

That's a good tip however the AP AC LITE I bought was set to VHT by default.

If you really want super high wifi bandwidth and range the pro/hd APs are what you want to go with.

That said the Wifi performance on the AP LITE I have is better than the performance on some of my previous high end routers like the ASUS AC-87u which is a 2400MBP/s rated router with 1733MBPs Wave2 TurboQAM enabled 5G radio.

Most of my network is wired and I have 2 Unifi AP LITE access points (I don't really need 2 for a 2 bed 78 sq/m apartment but it was a package deal for me), and it performs better than the Nighthawk and the ASUS routers I have.

I'll check the connectivity monitor to see if I can squeeze even more simultaneous bandwidth so thanks for that tip.

Hmm. On the Pro, all 5G radio options are "VHT" -- default on mine was VHT40, and switching to VHT80 is what helped. Does the LITE version allow you to choose one over the other?

(Or perhaps you meant VHT80 and typo'd?)

It was setup for VHT80 it could be a firmware issue or that I’ve selected a different option during the setup, but I never had to change it to get the full troughput that said the LITE is limited to 800mb/s on 5G.

I wouldn’t say dirt cheap - one could pickup 20€ WiFi with router capabilities and be happy with it.. Cheapest ubiquity here was somewhere around 80€ for just basestation. However I did pickup their router and WiFi for something like 160€ and couldnt be happier. Router software seemed superb in configuration options and signal strength covered my house without a breeze whereas I previously had 2. My best tech purchase for 2017.

I picked up a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X for 49 GBP and a Unifi AP-AC Lite for 60 GBP. It is dirt cheap when considering the options you have for what you are getting, if you live in Europe interface wise FritzBox is (or well was) great but they are really cheaping out on the hardware, their QoS is a joke and they are stuffing their cloud and remote access services down your throat constantly to the point where I no longer trust the boxes.

In the UK A mid to high end linksys or an ASUS-RT router would cost you north of 180 GBP, anything below 150 GBP or so is often not better than what you get from the ISP here, both BT has a decent box for the braindead and some small ISPs like Zen offer mid range FritzBoxes (3XXX series).

Before that I've basically was running DD-WRT but I just gave up on it, too many problems, advanced features are not supported, issues with routers, security issues taking a long ass time to fix and unless I'm willing to script everything It became unmanageable via the web interface.

I also consider the ubiquiti purchase as one if not the best tech purchase of 2017, I didn't realize the prices came down so much when I was looking at it as an option a few years ago it was 3 or more times the price.

I bought a Ubiquiti Unifi or whatever their access points is called. It cost me around $200 but it gives me kinda of shit wifi-speeds. I have 250mbit/s and get like 100 over the air.

I have changed settings many times, but it just seems capped for some reason.

Any chance you've got it plugged into a 100 Mbps port?

I get just over 100mbit/s so it's a gigabit port with Cat6 shielded TP. I use an Edge Router X and when I plug my computer straight into that by cable I get the speed I should get which is 250mbit/s.

But good guess, thanks anyway.

> Ubiquiti is dirt cheap for the entry level which pretty much outperforms any consumer oriented routers on the market.

Very true, but unless you're talking about Amplifi, this is usually a non-starter for 95% of the non-tech population.

I took the parent's suggestion as being targeted for the HN audience; I agree that for most people, it's impossible to use, but for the readers here, I'd say it's an apt recommendation.

Ubiquity is using openwrt since a few years ago with their own UI I thought?

Not as far as i know they use EdgeOS for the routers and AirOS for their managed APs, with a few others for their SGAs and managed switches.

As far as I know they never used OpenWRT or anything like it, if they did they hid it very well to the point where it would be legal for them to remove it from their license agreements.

The CLI and the file system you can see on the router looks and acts nothing like OpenWRT.

Ubiquiti uses EdgeOS, which was forked from Vyatta, with their own UI on top of it.

Doesn't the Entry level one only have 2.4 GHz Wifi?

It's also a security nightmare unless you are trained network engineer who can configure the thing properly.

If that is your experience then thair guided setup has improved a lot over the years, besides configuring VLANs later because I have a few talkative devices on the network and I don't want crosstalk I didn't had to do anything other than to run their setup.

It configured the WAN interface, created the switch interface with the number of LAN ports I wanted, forced me to change the password, suggested that I should change the default username which removes the ubnt default username system completely, asked on which interfaces I wanted to turn UPNP on and enabled the firewall by default.

Ubiquiti does NOT outperform consumer oriented routers in the market. It doesn't even perform as well as some of its commercial competitors.

Ubiquitis work great and have a lot of great features, but range and throughput are not where they shine.

Really? Show me a consumer grade router that can handle anything near the PPS even the cheapest edgerouter can and router with proper QoS implementation that actually works.

100 uplink utilization with no affect on latency isn’t something I’ve seen before on consumer routers even with rate limiting and fencing.

my bad, I was specifically talking about wireless performance. I misread your post.

Even wireless... I have over 20 clients going and they handle it just fine, even transferring massive files. I can easily max out wireless AC. Maybe you're experience is with their older APs?

Completely disagree. It crushes Meraki and any consumer gear I've ever used in range AND throughput in all my testing. It seems like it's also pretty important to talk about what gear you're discussing, too.

You can read stuff like

https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-reviews/33...

https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-reviews/33...

And also just read their forums.