*yet

They will at some point just cash out.

They've been at this for a while. They do have offerings you subscribe for and pay monthly. They have also consistently offered an option for each of those offerings to bring your own or self host. They've earned my trust.

>>they’ve earned my trust

Boy I hope Broadcom didn’t hear that…

I tend to agree with you.

In my opinion, as long as the majority of their profits come from people continuing to buy the self-host devices, it is fairly unlikely they'll ever stop offering those devices. Why change a working business model?

Yes, subscription models are enticing for that recurring revenue... number must go up, right? /s

If a majority of your sales are not in subscription products though, I think it would be foolish for a business to blow off its own leg trying to chase that particular dragon.

Then again... businesses have made dumber calls in the past out of nowhere...

They can sell subscriptions to people who buy them and allow self contained as possible. For securities sake requiring off-site storage of a security system is a non-starter.

Yeah, that's also a very good point. I imagine they're going to need to support that use case indefinitely. Hence their edge/IoT line of managed switches.

Recently they removed the option to take certain types of backup locally (for the Network app). Now it only does it to the cloud, for those who allow this. It’s these small things that make me cautiously pessimistic that long term Ubiquity won’t pull the rug from under the customers.

Once you invest thousands in network equipment or cameras you’re less likely to jump ship when they start sneaking things in. And this is long lived equipment, not the kind you anyway replace every couple of years. So that’s a relatively strong lock-in.

They would be shooting themselves in the foot in the long term. I was surprised to learn that Ubiquiti is a publicly traded company, but also the CEO and founder owns the mass majority of the shares, so he is not beholden by shareholders wanting to enshittify the company for the same of increased stock prices.

It is their number one selling point vs. the competition. The space has already a dozen vendors with a healthy product mix.

It's definitely where they fit now, but are Ubiquiti's goals really always going to be the cheapest option when there are already a dozen other vendors who have demonstrated how to get higher margins & subscription revenue?

The usual trend that the smaller upsets compete on cost until they get higher and higher volume and work their way into higher and higher end markets. Ubiquiti 10 years ago was mostly doing volume for small niche ISPs or prosumers at home, now it's got enormous gains in SMB & products aimed at enterprise. I don't think they'll just stop at where they are, focus will keep shifting to wherever they think they can grow to rather than where they've had success before.

Anything can be sold to PE.

Sure. But all you can do, when deciding with whom to do business, is base your decision on what they have already done. It's not viable to refuse to do business with a company on the basis of "they might one day get bought by PE and introduce customer hostile changes".

I mean, in the NAS space with a plethora of open source alternatives, that is a viable stance.

Yeah actually, there are tons of PE-proof ways to go about building a NAS.

My "NAS" is a NUC with a couple drives plugged into it using a USB DAS. apt install zfs samba, and away you go.

At home, my "NAS" is the Linux desktop box under my desk. It's got a bunch of local drives doing ZFS things, and samba.

I could split up the functions into different boxes and build a faster LAN to connect them, but doing that wouldn't improve anything except giving me more parts to goof around with. :)

Ubiquiti is a giant publicly traded company... Read about the CEO, this won't happen.

They are already a public company.

93% owned by the founder.

I had to fact check this. Turns out it is true. I was not aware on US stock exchange you can have a public company with less than 10% public float.

This also makes the founder net worth of around $33B.

If you think that is bad, look into the spacex ipo. That tiny public offering is for stock that can barely vote and cannot bring shareholder actions, making them more NFTs than proper "shares" imho.

It's not bad. Great returns, company is extremely well run.

I know about voting shares and shareholder actions in US stock because they are somewhat frequently sited in all press and media. I just didn't know about sub 10% float.

I know there are plenty of ways to go around it via trust funds or other entities to hide it so the ownership could be extremely concenrtated. But having it actually allowed is something I didn't know.

You can take a public company private and then run it to the ground. See also: Twitter.

How does that work now they are a subsidiary of SpaceX?

Does that make the rotting corpse of Twitter public again?

Yes. Although the amount of SpaceX stock that's available for public is fairly little.

And those classes available for the public has less voting rights than Elons stock so even worse.

So man makes company, man shares profitability of company with world to invest in. World complains they can't outvote man.

Some of the details you are missing here matter quite a lot.

Im not an investor so I don’t care. But anyone buying into SpaceX should probably care that you are investing in a company you have zero influence in.

I don't believe this. They've been around since 2003, and the Unifi line started in 2010. If they were going to enshittify it would have happened by now. Cynicism is not always warranted.

I just wish they would put better processors in their stuff. Is this yet another NAS powered by an ARM Cortex?

I have heard others say the same as you about Ubiquiti devices. I genuinely curious what bottlenecks you've hit.

I've only been using Ubiquiti as a pro-sumer, but it has held up well for my use case of Plex and little game servers.

I use a Synology NAS for my storage though, which is a slightly beefier mobile AMD chipset.

I'd be very interested to know what I should and shouldn't expect from my ARM based network stack though!

> I genuinely curious what bottlenecks you've hit.

1. My UDM Pro absolutely chokes and stalls with intrusion detection enabled on the firewall and 8 cameras connected. Network goes down, cameras disconnect, devices disconnect from Wi-Fi every time a car drives past a camera due to AI features triggering, etc.

For something meant for small businesses I wish they would just shove an Intel i5 or something in it. They make great switches, great APs, great everything else, just too stingy on processors on the few pieces of central equipment that people would actually be willing to spend more on.

3. The UNAS 8 I don't own but I believe it would struggle with >1Gbps links and encryption enabled

Unifi docs say that the AI feature run directly on the camera or via optional devices like the AI Port or AI Key. Odd that it impacts your UDM Pro and wifi.

I'm sure even if the camera runs the neural net, the detection itself triggers clips to be stored, re-encoded, indexed, etc. and the UDM Pro's processor is underpowered even for this.

It's even underpowered for streaming -- I found Protect to be extremely laggy, taking often 30+ seconds to open the camera stream when 3-4 stream receivers were connected.

Yeah . Sounds like horseshit to me to be frank.

I have a udm se, 10 g3 cams, 4k bullet+ai, door entry + cam +ai, couple of the display viewports running all day and a nano hd access point and symmetric gig with intrusion etc turned on. I also have wireguard users connecting in remotely.

No problems with performance whatsoever at this point.

Ok its not enterprisy its just a small business with 20 people but seems fine to me. I run synology servers.

He did say intrusion detection so that's probably it. That, and if you're using any kind of complicated firewall rules, those aren't HW accelerated like enterprise gear, so throughput tanks.

This is worse with the older devices.

For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4yKf044meY

https://community.ui.com/questions/UniFi-Gateway-Intrusion-D...

Yeah the older devices were notoriously bad when intrusion was on.

I also have it on on my unit .

I do agree though nonharm in giving a bit more power. Why skimp on the cpu.

1. Same here - but it's only become a problem as protect has gained features (# of cameras stayed the same). I got a UNVR Instant and all the issues went away (I have been waiting for an updated 1U NVR but still not out yet). It sucks, but otoh protect is light years better than it had been.

I dont mind using ARM for NAS, but (to be fair I have not looked in a while) the issue is they tend to not have many pcie lanes. Looks like the N2 can have up to 64 @pcie5 so if it's built well, I don't think the CPU will be too much of a bottleneck.

Hell I'll put it out there - some company should make a NAS-specific ARM chip line to make lines of way less expensive (well pre the current troubles) base NAS enclosures with lots of NVMe etc.

Yeah mine solved once I got a UNVR as well but I would have rather paid for a better processor in the UDM Pro and not needed to buy a separate UNVR.

Turn off the intrusion detection and your throughput should be significantly better.

If something has features I expect to be able to use them. They should put enough CPU to make the advertised features usable in tandem.

I have to agree. I only have a consumer UDM (four years old) and it's on its last legs. From day one it was using 90%+ of its RAM and hit the CPU ceiling during large file transfers. Successive updates have pushed it well beyond its limits. I have had to disable many features like VPN and IDS/IPS. I was considering upgrading to the newer Dream Router 7 but the processor is not much of an upgrade, and it only has 3GB of RAM vs my current 2GB. I don't have space for a Pro and I'm not even sure I want one. I already have an Unraid server running with more than enough compute and RAM, and I'm going to try using OPNsense. I would prefer dedicated hardware but for the cost, it's just not worth it.

The Cloud Key Gen 2 is underpowered depending what you do with it, and it runs hot. UniFi seriously needs to refresh it. (At least it’s better than the Gen 1. The Gen 1 was disastrously bad.)

The ENAS looks like fairly nice hardware. It even has ECC RAM. Not cheap, though.

Considering how long it has been I don't think we will ever see a Cloud Key Gen 3/3+.

Ubiquiti's Cloud Gateway Max or Fiber seems to be the modern replacement since they do the job of the Cloud Key while also serving as your router and firewall.

I'd be surprised if Cloud Key gets another revision, it's a dead product line as I see it. The main purpose was to provide an appliance alternative to running the controller on your own server, which is now unnecessary for most users because the routers and NVRs can all host their own controllers.

The remaining market for such a product is people who are running UniFi switches and/or APs but not the router and yet still want an appliance, which is not a large space. Most of that market either has a random server they can run it on or is willing to throw together a Raspberry Pi controller.

Basic routing and switching - expect line speed. Don't expect analysis features to run at line speed - 30-50% penalty could be normal depending on throughput.

Stay away from IPS and complicated firewall rules which usually are done in CPU, and you should be fine. HW acceleration for those (esp. TLS decryption) is a major reason fancy firewalls are very expensive. You're better off building an IDS or picking up a smaller FortiGate or Palo Alto firewall if you really want to get serious there.

I echo what the others say in that it's much more important to know what portions of your traffic are going to need to be processed by the CPU than it is to know how beefy the CPU is. E.g., just to give an example of the usual investigation process:

- The EdgeRouter 12P is ancient and had a weak CPU for even the time

- However, the EdgeRouter 12P has a good selection of hardware offloads for things like routing/NAT & even a hardware switch chip. These functions will often run at (or very near) line rate without touching the CPU much, and the latency/jitter/buffer handling will often be better than when even fast CPUs handle the traffic on other products.

- Buuuut there are oddball restrictions. E.g. on the newer 2.x or 3.x software streams (i.e. for the last ~5 years) hardware offload for VLAN tagged traffic on the switch does not work, and the CPU cannot switch a full 1G of traffic without choking (it gets close, but not quite). Also the hardware switch only covers a certain range of ports, some ports can only be routed or software bridged.

- Even then, if you add a bunch of advanced firewall inspection rules it's gonna run out of CPU. Quicker if it didn't have offloads for some of the work, but still easy to make it go from a solid full gigabit WAN NAT box to 100-200 mbps depending on what you enable. This can repeat for a lot of features, like VPN and so on.

As far as host networking (i.e. a server sending data out of its NIC rather than trying to be a network switch/router/firewall between segments) usually the CPU will be a limitation for other things before it's the limitation for sending things out the NIC. And a quality NIC (which these particular ones seem to be) can make that even more true in a similar, but less extreme, way as the switching/routing hardware offloads on the EdgeRouter. E.g. ZFS can be CPU heavy with all of the parity/encryption/deduplication features you can enable and trying to do that on top of using SFTP to transfer the data to a remote host in a single encrypted stream can stress the CPU even more... but this CPU also doesn't look like a typical bargain basement ARM CPU you'd find in cheaper Ubiquiti products and would probably do fine for what it has.

It says 8 Arm Neoverse N2 cores in the blog post. So not directly ARM Cortex, derived from ARM Cortex-X3 but same family as NVIDIA Grace, Google Axion and AWS Graviton4.

It's based on Neoverse N2 which in our other platforms (e.g., ENVR Core, UDM Beast, EF Core) has contributed to vast improvements in performance versus ARM Cortex.

This is how they make their money. They put out underpowered crap and constantly churn them so you have to pay them regularly. If something isn't profitable to maintain it just goes EoL.

The founders being the erstwhile Apple routers team, I believe they are playing the Apple game — sell good quality hardware; free the software that runs the hardware.

That’s just patently not true for Ubiquiti. You enter the Enterprise space with them and you are paying monthly. Their very expensive Identity Enterprise monthly per user subscription and their per site support charges to be able to get help with their latest rushed release. Paying extra for Apple wallet support. And you don’t even get complete APIs in return, or proper SCIM integrations. Can’t even pull access logs via API. Infuriating company that just do not function at scale.

Quite honestly it sounds like:

1. Your use case falls squarely into "you should be paying for support" territory. 2. You're setting things up incorrectly. You should be shipping logs, not scraping them when you think you need them.

I don’t begrudge paying for support, I want to. But it needs to be good.

And I want to ship logs, but they don’t provide a mechanism for all their logs to be shipped.

Don’t assume ;)