The problem is that they set a bar there. There is a gulf between consumer and enterprise APs that is full of only Unifi-esque gear. “Cloud management” is an OOB requirement and primary use case for SOHO gear these days. It’s a fleet management issue, just wish it could be done with proper config management and not phoning home. But they’re selling to small shops doing IT for 10s of law firms or doctor’s offices.

I’d never use Ubiquiti’s switches, routers, etc. There are great alternatives there. But when I went to replace my APs earlier this year I still could not find anything less shady that still did what I needed.

Is there an alternative that does PoE w/ multiple APs that hand-off well? And decent hardware…

TP-Link has a similar offering but with similar problems.

OpenWRT on [consumer gear] is not an answer here. More effort goes into the plastic than the hardware. Never dealing with cheap NICs, bad SoCs, inadequate memory, garbage drivers, etc. again.

You don't have to use their cloud services, everything can be managed 100% locally.

With that said I'm moving away from Ubiquity after years of broken pointless updates, years long outstanding bugs, and after this thread obvious massive lacking security.

They’ve pretty much broken that in practice since the last major firmware update.

I just only turn my controller on when I’m working now and occasionally have to re-adopt.

And alternatives likely have similar issues. It’s what naturally occurs when small businesses get large, and especially when companies go from embedded to SaaS development.

It's mostly meant for enterprise use cases. Think something like hotel WiFi. Which is easier to secure? The cloud accounts, or physical access to the several hundred devices in the hotel? Even in private buildings, if you're deploying thousands of access points, you may not trust the minimum wage third party contractors doing all the installations and don't want on-device configuration to be possible.

That's a good point.