4-6 years ago things still looked quite promising, high energy great community and forums (gone now), a basic but workable issue/feature tracker (gone), lots of clearly talented engineers who were responsive and right there (gone), etc. Very good price/performance, quality and so on particularly compared to other stuff of the time. There was a reason it got a lot of recommendations. That was certainly a while ago now though.
They've always seemed like the MongoDB of network hardware.
Eh. Though a grim bit of irony is how old a version of MongoDB they've stuck on too amongst other things.
>COTS hardware tends to be more expensive and power hungry
Not enough to me to matter I guess. For applications like this one can find solid low power hardware, Xeon-Ds for example, that consume tens of watts at max load and idle plenty low. Or truly embedded stuff a single digits. There are enormous floods of stuff available that is a few years old for dimes or even pennies on the dollar. I replaced all my USG-4Ps with a few years old Supermicro Xeon-D front-network port systems I got for around $350. An extra 20W 24/7/365 is something like $20-30/year, for a device this important that's well worth it to me. And there's no comparison, it's a slaughter. Real systems have actual BMC/IPMI which is super handy if things go wrong. The performance is just ludicrously higher. It's trivial to have more RAM, the system runs off of mirrored ZFS drives I can count on, it can do HA, etc etc. All the normal tools are available.
I'd even take an old Celeron or Atom system over a USG though. Even without going to second hand market, something like Protectli's basic J3060 based FW2B would still be better IMO and has a max power of 12W, fanless. "Purpose built network hardware" doesn't mean much, hardware vlan filtering or offload for CRC/LRO/TSO are something a decent NIC can do, or even plenty of built-in stuff.
As for Ubiquiti, I remember them thumbing their noses at the GPL and introducing security bugs in u-boot or having no idea how to fix the issues with RADIUS. They had no clue how to work around Cavium bugs (or get support from Cavium). I remember a company that shipped products based on a lightly skinned Vyatta using an end-of-life'd version of Debian (note that Debian ended support specifically for MIPS). I remember a company that shipped products (ER-X, ER-L) that ran hot enough to reliably cook themselves. And, yeah, Mongo. It was just a mess top-to-bottom.
This is very true. However if you bypass the Dream Machine and just use some other router or an EdgeRouter it’s ridiculously reliable in the home setting.
There are a heap of nice features in the UDM line, but wow does it need polish and stability.
My wifi is the best I’ve every used by a million miles, but the UDMP crashes and has weird behaviour that requires heroics to repair.
The big problem is that homelab/SOHO folks (myself included) don't want to pay the upfront cost of supporting or developing/testing modern hardware. At the price point Ubiquiti is targeting I think any entrant will be doomed to failure.