One of the FEW downsides for smaller installations, is them not selling a Cloud Key, Gateway, and Switch in a single box.

I agree. Right now I have the edge router lite. I have it setup so 4 ports are switched together and then I use poe pass-through to power my access point. Then I run the unifi software on a raspberry pi.

I would love at least a gateway/cloud key combo to simplify things. The separate switch doesn't bother me as much though.

one more thing to go wrong in the field, one more cable to get unplugged. a key/gateway/24portPOEswitch would be a single device people can run ethernet to for APs, and plug their office pcs into. If you have a rack its irrelevant, but for some kind of trailer where its sitting on the floor... or mounted to a wall.

I just ran both UNMS and the UniFi controller on a gcp instance (free credits). Their software is unconsistent though (the fact that there’s separate UNMS for the edgerouter and UniFi for the aps should already tell you that) but for example: the UNMS container sets up letsencyrpt etc but unifi does not.

Had to modify it to mount bind a shared cert location.

This drives me insane! I get that in a commercial environment those are typically treated differently, but at home I want one device that I can manage everything from.

I'm currently commandeering a R-Pi as a controller, but I tend to misplace it when it gets pulled into other projects.

What are you talking about? There’s https://amplifi.com/ for, let’s say, less sophisticated home installations.

Amplifi is apples to oranges with their full setup.

I installed an Amplifi AP/Router at my parent's house. It works absolutely phenomenally for their use case, but is basically plug and play. The Ubiquiti gear is worlds more configurable.

which tends to fair poorly compared to orbi, asus, velop and others. a bottom of the pack product at the moment. its also not part of the unifi family, and doesnt have the advanced management interface.

That's not happening any time soon.

The gen2 cloud keys don't do that, although the gen2 plus model merges the cloud key and NVR appliance into one device.

I love my Ubiquiti gear. Range isn't great, but in range it's absolutely rock solid. The only time I have downtime is when I upgrade or tinker too much an mess something up. I've had it for 3 years and don't see it petering out anytime soon. 3 to 5 years is the most I've had my consumer grade stuff last.

The fact that I can run VPN/Wireguard/Basic Network apps on my router is fantastic. If I ever get tired of the range (which is only an issue in my garage on the other side of the house), I'll simply get another AP.

I installed Ubiquiti at home and it was a terrible experience. I really wanted it to work, but my wife teased me long enough about my "professional grade" installation that I gave up. She was right.

The biggest issue was range, which was much worse than what I got with I had with a traditional consumer access point (I had a TP-Link Archer C7.) It was not even close.

The handover didn't work very well either. Much older UniFi products used Qualcomm wifi chipset which had excellent hand-over, the later versions used Broadcom which didn't have that yet.

I replaced everything with Eero, which just worked.

The AmpliFi product line of Ubiquiti supposedly offers similar features as Eero, but that didn't exist yet when I made the switch.

The problem with UniFi is people read about how great it was for someone who somewhat haphazardly flung a few APs around their house and lived happily ever after... and for many it's just not going to work out that way.

A lot of work can go into making WiFi work well.

With multiple APs you've got to adjust the Transmit power (defaults to Auto, which means High, which is generally bad). For good roaming, increasing the minRSSI is critical. 5G and 2.4G have very different propagation characteristics so they need to be optimized individually. With several APs you may even want to disable 2.4G on some of them.

Band Steering may or may not play nicely with the devices you have. Some devices have trouble if they can see many APs advertising the same SSID -- Ring Doorbells are notorious for not being willing to associate to an SSID at all if many APs are advertising the same SSID.

At my old house I got away with one AP placed centrally in the attic and another in my detached garage. At my new house, at about 2.5X the size, I'm running 5 APs and it has taken me a solid month of fiddling to get my devices consistently associating to the best AP and roaming appropriately.

> For good roaming, increasing the minRSSI is critical.

This! I thought the UAPs sucked until I played with transmit power and especially min RSSI.

I’ve been using the UniFi line for about a year now, covering the whole property and house in rock-solid WiFi. It took a few hours of walking around with a laptop and tinkering with settings/placement but I couldn’t be happier now.