> but it can handle 500+ concurrent users while delivering 800 Mbps on 2.4 ghz and 1733 Mbps on 5 ghz.

i feel you, its much better than your previous ap's but please dont buy too much into the marketing.

(single dualband-ap can at best handle >200 concurrent devices, but not active users)

And those throughput figures will be shared among all the users. Not available to each and every user, as it seems to imply.

I don't think anyone in their right mind interprets that as 800mb/s or 1733mb/s to 500 users simultaneously. It's pretty clear what it means.

What may be pretty clear to a majority of HN readers may not be so clear to the vast majority of consumers

> please dont buy too much into the marketing.

I'm confused, I thought the entire premise of the comment was that they actually measured the performances of these routers instead of looking at marketing?

Nah, simple fact OP cited 802.11ac marketing wank numbers means nothing was measured. For starters those are PHY Speeds, bits in the medium (air), that doesnt take into account overhead. AC has 65% _best case scenario_ efficiency (only two devices practically sitting on top of each other), while N had 80%. Then you get up to 10dBm worse SNR at top speeds compared to N.

>> I have around 70 wifi devices in my apartment. >> there is a ton of WiFi noise from other neighbors.

Is there? I wonder if your neighbors are having similar problems?

Generally wifi noise "from neighbers" Comes from a bunch of independent radio groups that happen to use all of the specture. When you have a single AP home it doesn't matter if there are 5,000,000 devices on it to your neighbors it's when you get that second AP in another channel that's noise.

The reality is that these manufacturers aren't making their own WiFi chips. They all use the same few WiFi chips from the same few vendors.

There is room for variation in how the products are implemented, but there's no real reason why a consumer router shouldn't be delivering the same high rates unless there was something else weird going on.

A lot of WiFi hardware implements a substantial portion of the stack in firmware or driver blobs.

So even "the same few chips" can be manipulated to perform very differently. Stuff like retransmit, frame timing, power/gain control, and even tx/rxchain selection and MIMO configuration are often done in software and can be altered between suppliers. Additionally, vendor drivers often perform very poorly at the higher levels as well - the MAC level (associate/beacon/disassociate), the framing level, scheduling encryption/decryption, keeping track of associated clients, and so on, are also all often handled in software and can be optimized.

Plus, once we reach the router level, we also get into the often abysmal IP stack configuration on consumer-grade routers.

In short, there's a lot that can differ, both in IP-land and in chipset-land. Anyone who's "fixed" an ailing consumer router firmware by reflashing it with something else can understand the IP-land pieces, and a quick read through a driver written on the Linux SoftMAC stack (for example) can really illustrate how much goes on at the driver layer (not to mention firmware).

Vendors provide reference software for their chipsets. More often than not, the software provided by vendor is the bare minimum needed to prove that their hardware sort-of-kind-of works. It is by no means able to achieve the best performance out of a given system.

Source: worked at Ubiquiti (not on networking hardware though).

as someone who did windows device drivers a decade ago this so much - i took a example DDK driver and rewrote it entirely and the resulting performance gain was very noticeable. Not to mention at the time on the device side working around hardware bugs to take something from "yea it works" to "it works really really well!"

It's true they use the same chips, but board layout and connectors become important as you get to higher frequencies. Wifi antennas can be anything from PCB stripline to external whips.

That’s not true. Antenna design for these 5 ghz+ frequencies isn’t trivial at all.

My parents have a Ubiquiti as well. Don’t replace it until your friends have faster WiFi. It’s one of the best units I’ve ever used in a home. Probably the best, actually.

> it can handle 500+ concurrent users

no, it can't, try putting 60 actual laptops moving a moderate amount of traffic on it... ubiquiti and marketing hype have a near 1:1 venn diagram overlap.

I used to manage the network at a co-working space and I had two of these access points installed in a mesh setup, with one covering the main front room, and one covering the back part of the building.

I'm not sure if it can handle 500+ concurrent users, but we would frequently have as many as 100 people present and on the WiFi during some of the events we held, and we never had any issues. We would have people live streaming video while other people were working on their laptops. As the network admin, I regularly did speed tests and asked people how the internet was working for them and everyone was always very happy with it.

Over the course of about two years, we had over 3,000 people log into the WiFi, and never once had a single problem (other than from our main gigabit cable internet going down once or twice).

This is a HUGE contrast from my experience with consumer grade WiFi routers like Linksys, Netgear, and D-Link, which often advertise crazy speeds like 2,000 Mbps but only deliver 50 Mbps in real life. I once had a $300 D-Link router that I literally had to reboot every week or else it would become completely unusable and slow to a crawl, for example.

Ubiquiti is still pretty good for home usage. Their gear is the only one I have used so far that handles 10-15 active devices without breaking a sweat. Other APs I've tried fall apart pretty quickly at that number.

Any clue "How" did it fix everything?

With everybody's router blasting at High Power, what can you actually do on your side with just one router to compensate?

Thx muchly!

Nearby networks won't harm your signal to noise ratio unless there is active traffic. Most of the time, 90% of the 30 SSIDs you see nearby are mostly inactive.

Anyway, Ubiquity and commercial gear in general just has better software and hardware design.

* The UAP‑AC‑HD has been around for at least 5 years and still gets updates. Wifi is full of weird bugs so its impossible to release a new chip set bug-free. Consumer gear just doesn't get the same duration of support as commercial. * These access points are designed specifically for setting up networks with multiple APs and lots of nearby networks. * These APs are just access points and offload routing and even their UI to a router and management server. A lot of consumer gear uses/wastes a lot of RAM on their fancy management interfaces. * Exterior profile stays the same. Consumer gear companies spend a lot of time & money on marketing and redesigning the 'look' of their products which diverts focus. * Better management/software: All the Unifi APs use the same management server software which consolidates features and fixes. The software also has a lot of performance related features like disabling/limiting the slowest speed enabled on the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz network.

Really the last point is a really big one; consumer gear (besides new consumer mesh networks) is often sold on having great range/coverage but these can cause the whole network to be bogged down by a single device operating in 802.11g or older mode. Commercial gear expects you to use multiple APs to satisfy coverage but has the features to prevent network degradation.

It's really not power, it's just debugging and optimizing rates and retries. Lots of wifi has lots of dumb bugs that no one ever figures out, because stuff still mostly works, with all the built-in retries.

(I used to work for an enterprise WiFi AP vendor, debugged some driver bits myself ... back when 802.11n was brand new, all the enterprise vendors were increasing their effective throughput from 80mbps, to 100mbps, to 140mbps, etc, just by debugging and optimizing their drivers.)

Use DFS channels. I have a friend who is a streamer and lives in an urban setting... almost 100 5GHz APs are visible in a scan in her apartment. She was having constant issues that we tracked down to huge latency spikes due to the congestion for the non-DFS channels. It turns out that her cable company's wifi AP / cable-modems do not support DFS.

I got her a wifi AP that supports DFS, and she has not had any issues..

Note that I initially got her a fancy Netgear which claimed to support DFS, but we could never get it to work. I spent a week going in circles with their support and eventually returned it.

I eventually just gave her my several year old Atheros-based TP-Link router running DD-WRT. It was able to use DFS channels, and she has a channel to herself now.

Along with what everyone else has said some vendors such as Meraki and Ruckus have separate radios just designed for monitoring the spectrum and making changes accordingly. Groups of APs will automatically decrease their power and channel swap to avoid channel overlap etc.

Ubiquiti is enterprise grade gear, so first thing is this is not a router, it's just an access point, and it's optimized for lots of devices, lots of interference typical of office scenarios.

An an owner of a decent amount of Ubiquiti gear, it’s “enterprise” in the sense that the management system scales to lots of devices, and that’s about it. Every recent revision of the management tools makes it shinier and less usable.

For enthusiasts and small and medium businesses it is fine, but it definitely is not enterprise grade.

Agreed with the other comments here. I couldn't stand the Ubiquiti mgmt interface for home as it needed a VM or chroot plus a database instance, etc.. When I switched to an equally spec'd Ruckus, I was blown away at the performance difference. Also the mgmt interface a simple web interface. I couldn't be happier with my switch and will probably be sticking to Ruckus for my home for the forseeable future.

and at my initial google 10x the price lol

It’s pro-sumer, definitely not enterprise grade gear at all.

The Ubiquiti stuff has a lot of automatic channel selection stuff built in to use the best frequencies for your conditions.

Most APs do this already.

Most APs do this once at startup.

Gives you good benchmarks when you start it but over time fails in a noisy environment.

So cell breathing is effectively prevented?

I guess it comes down to how well they do it.

Maybe, but my experience with consumer grade network gear's software has left a lot to be desired. I'll never bother with Netgear/Linksys crap again.

> I was able to get 300-400 Mbps in pretty much every room

I thought it was 1733 Mbps on 5 ghz? Is that figure the throughput sum over all concurrent devices? If so, could a single device with multiple antennas get 1733 Mbps rather than 300-400?

Personally I've never been able to go much above 400Mbps on Wifi 5 with any device. I'm hoping Wifi 6 will change that.

1733 is a bullshit marketing figure. Nobody has ever seen that.

The best I’ve ever seen on WiFi 5 is 850-900 MBps (4x4 MU-MIMO router, 3x3 MacBook Pro, nothing else active on the network)

I’ve bought one of those to upgrade a Mac airport. It’s rubbish! I get much faster real world rates on the old airport and it doesn’t fall off with range so quickly! Very disappointed. Great marketing though!

I see that the Wifi 5 access point that you write is more expensive than their Wifi 6 offering, and it's advised for outdoor scenarios.

Which is the best router for long range and just few decices?

Any router with a directional antenna pointed in the direction you need.

How far is long range to you?

You might be better off to do a Station->AP wireless shot with a couple of Nanobeams if you're getting crap signal, if there is electricity where your signal is crap. If you'd like to use Ubiquiti, that is.

just about 15m, but it needs to go through a wall. It’s not even a big apartment, and the walls are not that thick, but as it’s in 1 direction, I’ll try to get a directional antenna as the other commenter advised. Also probably any long-range device will be better than the cheap Wifi 6 Archer that I bought (although it was a great improvement for short range ping time compared to the Wifi 5 router that I had before)

If you manage get the signal from the AP to the device, just remember the device has to be able to talk back.

If the device is low powered, this may still be a problem.

A multi AP system allows the higher powered APs to talk to each other, and the lower powered devices to talk to the nearest AP.

sure, I’ll try that, but when I tried it before, the added latency was as bad as the original connection (though the repeaters didn’t have external antenna).

Quite often the biggest problem is not the transmission speed / latency, but my Samsung Note 10 reconnects to the AP randomly.

If it’s headed through a wall, you might be better off putting an AP in the room that it will be used and backhauling over power line adapters or a MoCA adapter if you have some unused coax drops. It doesn’t seem like you would get good performance out of power line adapters in that application, but my experience has been pretty good. You can even find Homeplug devices that also do PoE, so it’s minimal wiring at the AP.

What is it? How is it different from wifi?

A wireless access point is just a more accurate accurate term for a wireless router.

If you're asking what the Unifi UAP‑AC‑HD is, it's a relatively inexpensive, prosumer, wireless access point from Ubiquiti. The main appeal is: the Unifi ecosystem (optional, but it does offer extra capabilities for your network) and PoE connectivity (ethernet cable is used for data and power). I have two Unifi AC Lites (a slightly less capable model than the HD) in my home they work quite well (and also look good).

On the professional end, Ubiquiti provides wifi hardware for commercial settings like stadiums and conference halls, so they're well versed in creating hardware/software that deals with hundreds or thousands of users/clients. They also offer long-distance communication equipment (think 'wifi' over hundreds of metres)

To be more precise most serious business grade wireless access points such as the Unifi UAP series are not actually routers, they're layer 2 ethernet bridges onto a single switch fabric, or a varied set of VLANs in the case of an AP that broadcasts multiple SSIDs and connects users to different network segments.

The routing is done elsewhere, either at the switch that the AP is plugged into, or something another hop or two upstream of that.

The typical $50-100 "router" with built in 802.11ac wifi that you might buy at best buy is indeed a router, with both wifi, some basic routing/nat ability, and a dedicated WAN interface.

The Ubiquiti hardware is fantastic!

to be honest, any moderm AP will do the job. processing power increased by a lot recently and the spec is mostly just narrowing down what enterprise gear used to do for years as an "extra". e.g. wifi6 (ax) is just officializing beam forming that every premium ap had since wifi-n but was not part of the spec.

praising unifi you are just suffering from new-shiny-toy-syndrome. Specially because your unifi AP is the only (few?) product on the market that requires a second appliance to work (and don't even get me started on running the controller on a vm with outdated dependencies, out of sync open source code, and broken mongoDB implementation) to not have more than half of the advertised features disabled (e.g. vlans, guest, etc)

> praising unifi you are just suffering from new-shiny-toy-syndrome

I was responsible for a small office, and I tried a bunch of different big-brand expensive prosumer APs, and they all had troubles.

I then tried Unifi gear, which wasn’t as easy to set up, but it worked flawlessly and has done so for years. I’ve since used a few different Ubiquiti products in a few other situations and the gear has just run solidly with zero trouble.

I have used other reliable gear: the Apple Airport was great but now discontinued, every Fritzbox I have dealt with has been fine, and I currently have a Mikrotic at home which has been reliable (albeit in a very undemanding environment). I am about to add a outdoors Ubiquiti AP at home.

Maybe gear is more reliable now, but I recommend Ubiquiti to friends and it hasn’t let me down yet.

Mikrotiks are good, and they are cheap, but they are very hands-on in setup, you have to know what are you doing.

I have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing, but still find Mikotik confusing and hard to set up for non-trivial use cases. Like configuring an SSID per VLAN.

Which AP are you looking at for the outdoors ?

Unifi APs being bridges only is a feature, not a bug. There's a wide range of all-in-one devices on the market; pure AP bridges, not so much.

And before you say, that you can configure all-in-one to work in bridge mode: yes, some of them. Many of them cannot, or have weird limitations when you do.

> Unifi APs being bridges only is a feature, not a bug

I think OP means that you have to be running Unifi somewhere in order to get all the features from the AP. Not that it's just an access point and requires a separate router (which I agree, is a huge plus).

Strictly speaking you don't need to run the controller. The Android app can configure APs in standalone mode and update their firmware.

He wrote "some features", not to run the APs in general.

You don't need controller per se to get per-user VLAN assignment or WPA Enterprise. What you need is running RADIUS server somewhere, and controller conveniently provides a basic one (it has FreeRadius underneath, but provides only basic configuration options, so you won't be able to use AD for your users; also do not edit the config manually, any update will wipe your edits).

For guest portal, you need, well, guest portal somewhere. The guest portal is a part of the controller. However, if you need guest portal, I don't see any problem running controller somewhere.

For the rest, you can also run controller on your computer once, configure everything and then shutdown the controller. All the devices will work fine without it.

Edit: word

you are correct. can't expect unifi fanboys to pass a reading comprehension test.

for the record, most other industry that offer APs that run on standalone will work with all features, or only advertise that feature on the package. For example, you don't see cisco(?) unleashed mode APs advertising guest portal, unless they can do it on unleashed (stand alone) mode.

Unifi is intentionally misleading.

Don't worry about that; even the biggest unifi fanboy will turn back into normalcy once they will have to contact the ubiquiti support (yeah, ubiquiti support, that's oxymoron).

I don't know about that. I use the second generation nest wifi and its struggling with the ~35 devices in my home.

How many of the mesh nodes do you have? I have three including the primary one, and have had as many as 50 devices on my network and it has worked flawlessly. Many are low bandwidth IoT devices/hubs, but I've literally never had any problems over three years.

About 30 of the devices are low bandwidth IOT devices, I have one hub and one node.

well, google consumer products are not exactly know for being "premium" in anything.