Unifi is the Apple of networking gear. When something new is released the HN crowd is excited even when the same functionality existed already with another company.
For wireless, the prices aren’t much different from products with comparable feature sets/performance. For some niche combinations, they’re the only option that doesn’t force you way upmarket (Meraki, etc.). Most of the money they make is from small business and tiny WISPs, not HN boosters overdoing it on their home WiFi in what must be a bid to get their partner to divorce them.
Their wired stuff is a total scam since Edgerouter fell off, though. The same functionality exists on a $50 netgear managed switch (or wired router, etc.), and the shitty unified configuration interface doesn’t justify the markup at all.
To be somewhat fair, the quality of their management tools for their switches and routers has increased somewhat, and some of their wired routers are actually decent on the price/performance spectrum these days.
Meanwhile, the quality of their competitors’ tools for managing multiple switches without manually configuring each one, individually, over SSH or via a graphical tool is not necessarily amazing.
For example, it’s been a while since I used Ruckus Unleashed (the low-end management tool from an very upmarket vendor), but I think UniFi Network (the management tool) is a good amount better than Unleashed.
I really wish the people who put so much effort into software like OpenWRT would put some of that effort into managing multiple devices in a nice, unified manner. The tooling could be so much better.
I recently bought their cloud fiber gateway and two in wall wifi 7 access points because I'm setting up a network in my new apartment and hear this multiple times.
Honestly they are nothing like Apple - like just look at their mobile apps - how many do they have - 10 ? To interact with the same gateway just for slightly different use-cases. Not to mention that the functionalities are hard to decipher
Because Unifi is more focused on the needs of businesses and enthusiasts. AVM and Netgear Orbi are products for the consumer market. So they miss a the advanced features Unifi supports.
Unifi is used by the tech-savvy homeowner that needs PoE for their security cameras and wants to control and configure their network without needing a network engineer.
"It just works" with Teltonika and Glinet as well. In most of the openwrt based routers multi-wan is already enabled. It is also very easy to do with TP-Link Omada (just enable a checkbox).
So, implying that Unifi is the only company that does this in an easy way is misleading marketing.
The problem I have seen is when I need it most, due to a rare fiber internet outage, so does everyone else nearby and cellular data becomes saturated and unusable.
Would be useful for 5G home internet if they had IMEI spoofing but I would doubt it. It sucks how the gateway from these services do not have external antenna support.
How does the Teltonika work out for you - I nearly bought it earlier this year but it doesn't have support for external antennae. I'm just on the edge of 5G coverage and I'm not sure I want to splash out on something which I can't tune for decent reception.
Seems an odd omission for a ruggedised outside modem - the Unifi also seems to not support external antennae.
(I'd also prefer a unifi version just so it fits in the with rest of the networking infra I have in the mökki.)
OTD500 is antenna + router in a single box. There is nothing else needed. I just put it outdoors with a POE cable. Originally, I used it as a backup, but now I have an unlimited SIM, so I use it as a second internet connection.
The fallback support for UniFi setups will be awesome.
I’m honestly tempted to get it for my house. My ISP downtime is pretty low but it does happen every once in a while, at the most inopportune times, which impedes working from home.
Having a wireless backup would hopefully cover those downtimes
I have a wireless backup[1] using Vyos[2] and a 5G router provided for free by the 5G service provider for those rare moments when both fiber links are dead.
At the same time I would never recommend anyone get 5G internet as their primary service if you have other options and especially not from one of these cheap providers.
I just did the update to 2025-Q2 (I use the quarterly stream build).
Initially I thought this is going to be a huge pain. I have many interfaces and also pass-through hardware like the SFP28 card. I made a copy of my primary router vm and added fake interfaces with the same MAC addresses. I then went through the update procedure which was very simple.
in vyos vm:
wget https://community-downloads.vyos.dev/stream/1.5-stream-2025-Q2/vyos-1.5-stream-2025-Q2-generic-amd64.iso -o vyos-1.5-stream-2025-Q2.iso
add system image /mnt/iso/vyos-1.5-stream-2025-Q2.iso
# follow prompts
reboot
# boot screen will offer two version now, old and new
That was it and it worked. So from now on I know I can just take a snapshot of my vm and do it directly on the main vm without making a copy.
You do loose any custom configs you may have. In my case it was fstab changes and my cron entries.
Indeed. It's very cheap ($5?) and is fast enough to do 1080p YouTube with unlimited data. It's speed capped so if you really need it it's best to upgrade the plan that month.
I am cautiously optimistic that this means even if thousands of these devices suddenly "light up" in an outage, the infrastructure should be able to handle them, right? Thoughts?
I for one think this is a great marketing opportunity. Even if you have the best gigabit fiber, at five dollars a month, this is a no brainer for a lot of people. If you can have monthly recurring revenue for starlink doing essentially nothing, why not? Also, it is probably easier to upsell to existing customers.
There are now quite a few options for wifi APs with cellular backup. I use TP-Link, and it's ok for the price, I guess, and supports adding OneMesh range extenders.
The problem with this setup for me is that it doesn't work with uplink that sometimes becomes unstable yet nominally working, and in general LTE fallback triggers slowly.
Are there any prosumer-friendly options for connection bundling, which can balance uplinks continuously?
We had a 5 day power outage (Bellevue WA, not exactly in the middle of nowhere) and after 2 days both the cable internet and cell towers went down, so even 5G would not have helped. I had backup power but no internet. On the way back from Best Buy with my new starlink, everything came back online of course. But now I’m ready for the next multi day outage.
I have a network cable from my secondary WAN port on my dream machine running to my first story roof where there’s a wall mount ready for starlink to be plopped in.
> after 2 days both the cable internet and cell towers went down, so even 5G would not have helped.
I discovered the same thing the hard way myself recently (in Norway); turns out that cell towers only has enough battery for ~24-36 hours (if you're lucky).
However, someone messing with the fibre to my house is a bigger possibility than power outage, so I'll probably end up with this 5G product. :)
Yeah, the fact you can use any of the ports on a dream machine as a WAN (its not optimal, but is an option) makes it really easy to have a couple of fallbacks if you really need high redundancy.
OT: Does anyone know of a setting or extension for Firefox to stop those autoplaying videos? I have gifs disabled, prefers-reduced-motion on, and those videos in that article both autoplay, and start again after pausing them manually. I have no idea what the article is about (except what the title says) because I kept getting distracted by the annoying videos.
Even if my vision is okay, it still feels like a slap to the face. Can't take some time to make sure the most important part of the page is readable by all.
oh, I didn't noticed that at first, but you are right.
What I did noticed is so many fast videos right next to text. I didn't even bother to read it (without firefox read mode) because it makes me a bit dizzy.
I’ve got their unifi mobile router 4g and am quite happy with it in conjunction with one of their routers which got two lan ports you can either run in primary/primary mode where it does load balancing or primary/secondary one where the latter only gets used when the main one has issues.
I just kinda wish multipath TCP or something similar would be more in use so you wouldn’t notice a swap in connection mid air.
The 5G max outdoor looks very good and seems to be a direct competitor to the pretty good Mikrotik LHG series. I wonder about the antenna gain, though, the Mikrotik certainly looks more impressive.
(I've been using Mikrotik LHG LTE6 kit devices for years now)
Antenna gain isn't everything: I've set up the LTE6 for people, and in some cases I was able to get more speed in the same location with the latest iPhone.
In locations where you're at the edge of coverage, and your phone is not getting anything at all, it's great.
I sometimes suspected that the modem in these LTE / 5G routers is less well tuned and tested with various network than what you have e.g. in an iPhone.
These things are nice when they work but when they don't you're completely in the dark. Even figuring out how much GB is left on your simcard is a nightmare.
The fact that the outdoor version is directional kind of limits its adoption in mobile usage, doesn't it? Most similar products have omnidirectional antenna. Can't imagine you would rotate it by hand on a boat towards the land while on passage
Not GP but I’m trying to figure out what you’re insinuating.
> For tougher environments or deployments with poor indoor cellular coverage, the outdoor model maintains the same high performance cellular connectivity with improved antenna performance in a durable IP67 rated enclosure. It is built for rooftop installs, off site locations, and mobile deployments where reliability is critical. Just like its indoor counterpart, you can also connect it via any PoE port, anywhere on your network, greatly simplifying cabling requirements.
And the first image they show of the outdoor model is it installed in a fixed location on a rooftop.
I think it’s going to be targeting mostly stationary HA redundant uplinks. Backup for primary uplink or low usage primary link. In those scenarios pointing at your nearest antenna fixed is much better than an omnidirectional antenna.
Is OpenWRT on Unifi APs any good? I hadn’t heard of it before, and I couldn’t find any performance comparisons on a quick search. Ubiquiti has gone downhill on a lot of things the last 5 years or so, but their radio firmware has always been a step up (within their price range) for me. I wouldn’t mind ditching the Unifi controller software though.
I'm using an U6+ with OpenWRT on it, flashed straight after unboxing and it's the only thing serving wireless in my household
It's alright except for some shenanigans with DHCP trying to compete with the router, I fixed that by just disabling DHCP on the AP if I recall correctly.
Speeds are pretty much as advertised on the box, the main thing using wireless is the TV as it has a 100mbit LAN port and it it's always smooth sailing. VLAN-separated SSIDs work great as well.
The controller is annoying and changes completely every 6 months, and for home I use basically none of its features beyond configuring the AP. Virtualy all the issues I’ve had with Unifi APs were controller bugs, telling the AP firmware to do stupid things when it could have done literally nothing.
That said, I have some concerns that the OpenWRT AP firmware is not as optimized as the Unifi firmware is for that specific hardware. Mostly for wireless performance, but I also don’t want to hit some weird CPU bottleneck.
Just bought a Gl.iNet Puli. It's only 4G but seems like a better option if you want to supply internet to some devices that you move around. Planning to use it for setup and management of a headless presentation PC as it can directly be connected to the LAN port.
I have a mobile 4g router from them and it supports physical esim. I even managed to get their suggested card for cheap. They have some support in their firmware to set it up, so you can do that fully on the router.
I have read that people managed to get an eSIM installed on it, but I think there are also physical eSIM options. See https://www.gl-inet.com/solutions/esim/
Can anybody explain to me why these supposedly premier networking devices are lacking so much in bandwidth? I get it that mmWave is really only ever realistically going to hit 2.5G over the air, but is there any reason why they're not willing to provide at least 10G copper, or an actual SFP port? Hell, even Macs support 10G these days. I never understood this. Do they mean 2 Gbps downlink per client, or per device in total? If it's the former, 2.5G wired seems like a major bottleneck to any serious consumption.
If a single client at 2 Gbps is all the promise of 5G amounted to, well, it would be disappointing to say the least.
This is a modem, it itself is the client of a cell tower/base station. So unless you put it in a faraday cage with the base station next to it, 2G is almost certainly enough.
The better reason to put a 10G transceiver in this would be that some (cheap, honestly garbage) SFP+ transceivers can’t negotiate anything between 1G and 10G. But I’ve only seen that on bargain-bin hardware so I don’t know that they should be designing products around it.
They said the same thing about 40G but hey, I've loved it for bridging the gap between my two (10G and 100G, respectively) Mikrotik switches. You can have a dozen Gigabit ports, as well as up to four true 10G devices on your aggregation switch, and neither would be bottlenecked by traffic to and from the backside. This has been a massive boon. However, when it comes to 2.5G, I struggle to find one good reason to use it; such a tiny step-up in bandwidth, and for what?
> However, when it comes to 2.5G, I struggle to find one good reason to use it; such a tiny step-up in bandwidth, and for what?
Portability and heat. You can get a small USB 2.5G adapter that produces negligible heat, but a Thunderbolt 10G adapter is large and produces a substantial amount of heat.
I use 10G at home, but the adapter I throw into my laptop bag is a tiny 2.5G adapter.
I’m sure it depends on the model, but in my experience if you force a 10G copper transceiver to 2.5G the insane heat generation goes away. I don’t have any Thunderbolt 10G adapters, but I’m kind of surprised they’re much larger. A SFP+ transceiver is the same size as a SFP one.
40G on Mikrotik is just channel bonding of 4 10G links at layer 2. It’s not like the vast majority of 100G that does layer 1 bonding. I really don’t know why they did it other than to have a bigger number on the spec sheet - I can’t imagine they save any money having a weird MAC setup almost nobody else uses on a few low-volume models.
Are motherboards commonly using PCIe 3.0 for onboard peripherals these days? I wouldn’t expect it to save them much money, but my PCIe knowledge is constrained to the application layer - I know next to nothing about the PHY or associated costs.
I gotta say, I hate it when companies use “xxx bits per second”, whether its Mega or Giga nobody uses bits per second and for the average consumer it’s very unclear that this differs from bytes.
Having to explain to relatives and such that “yeah you actually have to divide that by 8” is a hassle and I get tricked by it subconsciously at times as well.
2 gbps meaning 250 megabytes per second is a SCAM. A marketing sham at it’s finest.
“I have 100 mbps download” meaning “I get 12.5 megabytes download per second” is ridiculous!!
Networking only uses bits/s. Nobody in the networking world talks in bytes/s, and pretty much nobody in the data transfer world does.
The only industry that talks in bytes/s is parts of the storage space, because they relate to files, that are measured in bytes/s. And even them use both: the data link is in bits/s (e.g. SATA 6 is 6Gbps, NVMe uses the same bits/s than PCIe (1)) while the drive is usually in bytes/s (µSD cards, NVMe SSDs, etc).
When you look at the industry at large, throughput is virtually always measured in bits/s. HDMI is in bits/s. Video codecs measures bitrates in bits/s. Audio codecs measures bitrates in bits/s. PCIe is in bits/s (1). Ethernet is measured in bits/s. Wifi is measured in bits/s. You get the picture.
The good thing about keeping it consistent is that values are relatable. Streaming services naturally talk in bitrate for the video quality, and your ISP also talks in bits/s. You can compare the two numbers. Bytes/s is only really useful for on the spot jobs that you do once, like transferring photos from an SD card to your computer. Otherwise, it's just a unit.
(1): ackhstually pcie measures speeds in transfers/s because they include the 8b10b/64b66b encoding overhead and TLP overhead but I digress.
I honestly feel mibi and gibibytes per second are the easiest units to rationalise about. The data I am transferring is already known to me in its binary prefix unit. Seconds for that data to transfer is a trivial translation.
That’s not marketing related at all. It’s how network speeds have been measured long before ISPs were a business.
A byte per second is no more intuitive than a nibble per second or a bit per second. You might be used to byte as a power user because of storage, but I assure you that to regular people “256 gigabytes” is a meaningless number as well.
This ship sailed out of view a long time ago, the only GB you’ll see that is still base-2 is RAM. And that’s only because you literally can’t address physical RAM in non power-of-2 blocks in most architectures.
I am confused, this is just a 5G router right? Like the 5 year old Huawei CPE Pro 2 but with wifi7, poe and eSim?
[1] https://consumer.huawei.com/en/routers/5g-cpe-pro-2/
Unifi is the Apple of networking gear. When something new is released the HN crowd is excited even when the same functionality existed already with another company.
More like the Sonos of networking gear, in that they were once kinda cool but squandered it with questionable product decisions.
For wireless, the prices aren’t much different from products with comparable feature sets/performance. For some niche combinations, they’re the only option that doesn’t force you way upmarket (Meraki, etc.). Most of the money they make is from small business and tiny WISPs, not HN boosters overdoing it on their home WiFi in what must be a bid to get their partner to divorce them.
Their wired stuff is a total scam since Edgerouter fell off, though. The same functionality exists on a $50 netgear managed switch (or wired router, etc.), and the shitty unified configuration interface doesn’t justify the markup at all.
To be somewhat fair, the quality of their management tools for their switches and routers has increased somewhat, and some of their wired routers are actually decent on the price/performance spectrum these days.
Meanwhile, the quality of their competitors’ tools for managing multiple switches without manually configuring each one, individually, over SSH or via a graphical tool is not necessarily amazing.
For example, it’s been a while since I used Ruckus Unleashed (the low-end management tool from an very upmarket vendor), but I think UniFi Network (the management tool) is a good amount better than Unleashed.
I really wish the people who put so much effort into software like OpenWRT would put some of that effort into managing multiple devices in a nice, unified manner. The tooling could be so much better.
I recently bought their cloud fiber gateway and two in wall wifi 7 access points because I'm setting up a network in my new apartment and hear this multiple times.
Honestly they are nothing like Apple - like just look at their mobile apps - how many do they have - 10 ? To interact with the same gateway just for slightly different use-cases. Not to mention that the functionalities are hard to decipher
Apple of networking? I suppose no OpenWrt then.
You actually can install Openwrt on bunch of their hardware
Ah, this is a Ubiquity product. That explains it.
Why did AVM or Netgear Orbi not get this treatment for "works", though?
Because Unifi is more focused on the needs of businesses and enthusiasts. AVM and Netgear Orbi are products for the consumer market. So they miss a the advanced features Unifi supports.
Unifi is used by the tech-savvy homeowner that needs PoE for their security cameras and wants to control and configure their network without needing a network engineer.
Small aside, AVM have now formally rebranded as "FRITZ!"
I have this exact Huawei as my failover internet connection, works perfectly except doesn't do PoE so I need to have a stupid wall-wart for it.
What it can do, and Ubiquity already had this as a separate product, is act as a fallback for you regular internet connection.
You can do the same with Mikrotik and a ton of configuration, the pitch with Unify is that it "just works".
"It just works" with Teltonika and Glinet as well. In most of the openwrt based routers multi-wan is already enabled. It is also very easy to do with TP-Link Omada (just enable a checkbox).
So, implying that Unifi is the only company that does this in an easy way is misleading marketing.
Comparing against Mikrotik is a very low bar.
You're refuting a point he didn't make.
It's a modem, not a router.
There are both, the router is further down the page
Sure, but it’s not manufactured in Ch- ah, nevermind.
The problem I have seen is when I need it most, due to a rare fiber internet outage, so does everyone else nearby and cellular data becomes saturated and unusable.
Would be useful for 5G home internet if they had IMEI spoofing but I would doubt it. It sucks how the gateway from these services do not have external antenna support.
I am already doing what is shown in the video with Teltonika OTD500, fully unlocked and with esim support as well.
How does the Teltonika work out for you - I nearly bought it earlier this year but it doesn't have support for external antennae. I'm just on the edge of 5G coverage and I'm not sure I want to splash out on something which I can't tune for decent reception.
Seems an odd omission for a ruggedised outside modem - the Unifi also seems to not support external antennae.
(I'd also prefer a unifi version just so it fits in the with rest of the networking infra I have in the mökki.)
OTD500 is antenna + router in a single box. There is nothing else needed. I just put it outdoors with a POE cable. Originally, I used it as a backup, but now I have an unlimited SIM, so I use it as a second internet connection.
If you mean the standard routers (like the Rutx50), Teltonika itself sells external enclosures with antennas. https://www.teltonika-networks.com/products/accessories/ante...
The fallback support for UniFi setups will be awesome.
I’m honestly tempted to get it for my house. My ISP downtime is pretty low but it does happen every once in a while, at the most inopportune times, which impedes working from home.
Having a wireless backup would hopefully cover those downtimes
I have a wireless backup[1] using Vyos[2] and a 5G router provided for free by the 5G service provider for those rare moments when both fiber links are dead.
At the same time I would never recommend anyone get 5G internet as their primary service if you have other options and especially not from one of these cheap providers.
[1] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/
[2] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/vyos-router-update/#wan-f...
Hey, another person running VyOS!
How are you handling updates? Do you update on a fixed cadence, or do you build your own LTS? Or do you just take a random nightly and stick to it?
I just did the update to 2025-Q2 (I use the quarterly stream build).
Initially I thought this is going to be a huge pain. I have many interfaces and also pass-through hardware like the SFP28 card. I made a copy of my primary router vm and added fake interfaces with the same MAC addresses. I then went through the update procedure which was very simple.
in vyos vm:
That was it and it worked. So from now on I know I can just take a snapshot of my vm and do it directly on the main vm without making a copy.You do loose any custom configs you may have. In my case it was fstab changes and my cron entries.
Hundreds of us!
I adore VyOS
I used to do that. Now I use starlink as backup
Starlink has a specific backup plan too don't they?
Indeed. It's very cheap ($5?) and is fast enough to do 1080p YouTube with unlimited data. It's speed capped so if you really need it it's best to upgrade the plan that month.
Link? Cheapest I can find is $40/month
https://www.satelliteinternet.com/resources/starlink-standby...
Interesting option.
> 0.5Mbps (500Kbps)
I am cautiously optimistic that this means even if thousands of these devices suddenly "light up" in an outage, the infrastructure should be able to handle them, right? Thoughts?
You can’t use it perpetually they force you to upgrade after a while. It’s called „standby plan” for a reason.
I for one think this is a great marketing opportunity. Even if you have the best gigabit fiber, at five dollars a month, this is a no brainer for a lot of people. If you can have monthly recurring revenue for starlink doing essentially nothing, why not? Also, it is probably easier to upsell to existing customers.
There are now quite a few options for wifi APs with cellular backup. I use TP-Link, and it's ok for the price, I guess, and supports adding OneMesh range extenders.
The problem with this setup for me is that it doesn't work with uplink that sometimes becomes unstable yet nominally working, and in general LTE fallback triggers slowly.
Are there any prosumer-friendly options for connection bundling, which can balance uplinks continuously?
We had a 5 day power outage (Bellevue WA, not exactly in the middle of nowhere) and after 2 days both the cable internet and cell towers went down, so even 5G would not have helped. I had backup power but no internet. On the way back from Best Buy with my new starlink, everything came back online of course. But now I’m ready for the next multi day outage.
I have a network cable from my secondary WAN port on my dream machine running to my first story roof where there’s a wall mount ready for starlink to be plopped in.
I’ve made the second WAN a 10gb uplink.
I wish there were cheaper 10gb switch from Ubiquiti. The link Agg is good, but still pricey.
> after 2 days both the cable internet and cell towers went down, so even 5G would not have helped.
I discovered the same thing the hard way myself recently (in Norway); turns out that cell towers only has enough battery for ~24-36 hours (if you're lucky).
However, someone messing with the fibre to my house is a bigger possibility than power outage, so I'll probably end up with this 5G product. :)
Yeah, the fact you can use any of the ports on a dream machine as a WAN (its not optimal, but is an option) makes it really easy to have a couple of fallbacks if you really need high redundancy.
OT: Does anyone know of a setting or extension for Firefox to stop those autoplaying videos? I have gifs disabled, prefers-reduced-motion on, and those videos in that article both autoplay, and start again after pausing them manually. I have no idea what the article is about (except what the title says) because I kept getting distracted by the annoying videos.
Settings => Search for "Autoplay" => Click "Settings..." => For "Default for all websites" select "Block Audio and Video".
Thank you, I could have sworn I had that active, but for some reason it was "audio only".
The about:config settings which you can look up:
I have mine set to 2 and 5 respectively.I wish website designers would remember that not everyone can see great. This text is so fine and light and they’ve also disabled screen reader
Even if my vision is okay, it still feels like a slap to the face. Can't take some time to make sure the most important part of the page is readable by all.
Have you tried Firefox Reader View? It allows you to set whatever text size and font is best for you.
oh, I didn't noticed that at first, but you are right.
What I did noticed is so many fast videos right next to text. I didn't even bother to read it (without firefox read mode) because it makes me a bit dizzy.
Firefox reader view gives me better contrast. Also the text to speech mode works in reader view.
[dead]
I’ve got their unifi mobile router 4g and am quite happy with it in conjunction with one of their routers which got two lan ports you can either run in primary/primary mode where it does load balancing or primary/secondary one where the latter only gets used when the main one has issues.
I just kinda wish multipath TCP or something similar would be more in use so you wouldn’t notice a swap in connection mid air.
Do you know if we can use the T-Mobile home Internet? I think they require their own modem, but I’m not sure.
You can if it supports IMEI spoofing (which I doubt). You definitely can use GL inet 5G routers if you want an alternative
The 5G max outdoor looks very good and seems to be a direct competitor to the pretty good Mikrotik LHG series. I wonder about the antenna gain, though, the Mikrotik certainly looks more impressive.
(I've been using Mikrotik LHG LTE6 kit devices for years now)
Antenna gain isn't everything: I've set up the LTE6 for people, and in some cases I was able to get more speed in the same location with the latest iPhone.
In locations where you're at the edge of coverage, and your phone is not getting anything at all, it's great.
I sometimes suspected that the modem in these LTE / 5G routers is less well tuned and tested with various network than what you have e.g. in an iPhone.
This is my experience as well. Unless you actually need a directional antenna, an iPhone will be faster and more reliable than dedicated hardware.
> direct competitor to the pretty good Mikrotik LHG series
Is there a Mikrotik 5G version though? I am still waiting for that.
These things are nice when they work but when they don't you're completely in the dark. Even figuring out how much GB is left on your simcard is a nightmare.
Simplest solution is to get an unlimited card. Problem solved.
Why do limited cards even exist? Turns out there are various reasons (no need to go into them here).
The fact that the outdoor version is directional kind of limits its adoption in mobile usage, doesn't it? Most similar products have omnidirectional antenna. Can't imagine you would rotate it by hand on a boat towards the land while on passage
This product targets businesses where they will mount it in a fixed position and target a specific tower so they get the best throughput.
In their promotional video they call out mobile applications and they showing a car driving with it on top of it.
Did you read through the press release?
Not GP but I’m trying to figure out what you’re insinuating.
> For tougher environments or deployments with poor indoor cellular coverage, the outdoor model maintains the same high performance cellular connectivity with improved antenna performance in a durable IP67 rated enclosure. It is built for rooftop installs, off site locations, and mobile deployments where reliability is critical. Just like its indoor counterpart, you can also connect it via any PoE port, anywhere on your network, greatly simplifying cabling requirements.
And the first image they show of the outdoor model is it installed in a fixed location on a rooftop.
The video shows it on a moving vehicle
I think it’s going to be targeting mostly stationary HA redundant uplinks. Backup for primary uplink or low usage primary link. In those scenarios pointing at your nearest antenna fixed is much better than an omnidirectional antenna.
They clearly mention mobile use and show it on the animation as well. Which is why I am surprised.
So Ubiquity is trustworthy again?
After the 2.4GHz wifi issues with UDM I swore I will never buy them again.
Can't wait for this to get OpenWrt support so I can buy it and the first thing I do to be to nuke the UBNT firmware.
Is OpenWRT on Unifi APs any good? I hadn’t heard of it before, and I couldn’t find any performance comparisons on a quick search. Ubiquiti has gone downhill on a lot of things the last 5 years or so, but their radio firmware has always been a step up (within their price range) for me. I wouldn’t mind ditching the Unifi controller software though.
I'm using an U6+ with OpenWRT on it, flashed straight after unboxing and it's the only thing serving wireless in my household
It's alright except for some shenanigans with DHCP trying to compete with the router, I fixed that by just disabling DHCP on the AP if I recall correctly.
Speeds are pretty much as advertised on the box, the main thing using wireless is the TV as it has a 100mbit LAN port and it it's always smooth sailing. VLAN-separated SSIDs work great as well.
I’m surprised there aren’t any better options than flashing over a U6+
I don't recall their latest hardware is supported, but why would you want that anyway if you're not looking to go all in on their controller stack?
The controller is annoying and changes completely every 6 months, and for home I use basically none of its features beyond configuring the AP. Virtualy all the issues I’ve had with Unifi APs were controller bugs, telling the AP firmware to do stupid things when it could have done literally nothing.
That said, I have some concerns that the OpenWRT AP firmware is not as optimized as the Unifi firmware is for that specific hardware. Mostly for wireless performance, but I also don’t want to hit some weird CPU bottleneck.
There are several other companies (e.g. Teltonika, glinet) that offer similar solutions that can use OpenWrt today
Just bought a Gl.iNet Puli. It's only 4G but seems like a better option if you want to supply internet to some devices that you move around. Planning to use it for setup and management of a headless presentation PC as it can directly be connected to the LAN port.
Does it support eSIM? For backup internet, eSIM is good for avoiding monthly subscription, by paying per GB when needed.
I have a mobile 4g router from them and it supports physical esim. I even managed to get their suggested card for cheap. They have some support in their firmware to set it up, so you can do that fully on the router.
I have read that people managed to get an eSIM installed on it, but I think there are also physical eSIM options. See https://www.gl-inet.com/solutions/esim/
Edit: The SIMPoYo eSIM Physical Card (see https://www.gl-inet.com/campaign/simpoyo-cards/ ) seems really cool, may even be nice for a phone.
> Up to 2 Gbps downlink
> 2.5 Gbit/s PoE to upstream switch
Can anybody explain to me why these supposedly premier networking devices are lacking so much in bandwidth? I get it that mmWave is really only ever realistically going to hit 2.5G over the air, but is there any reason why they're not willing to provide at least 10G copper, or an actual SFP port? Hell, even Macs support 10G these days. I never understood this. Do they mean 2 Gbps downlink per client, or per device in total? If it's the former, 2.5G wired seems like a major bottleneck to any serious consumption.
If a single client at 2 Gbps is all the promise of 5G amounted to, well, it would be disappointing to say the least.
This is a modem, it itself is the client of a cell tower/base station. So unless you put it in a faraday cage with the base station next to it, 2G is almost certainly enough.
The better reason to put a 10G transceiver in this would be that some (cheap, honestly garbage) SFP+ transceivers can’t negotiate anything between 1G and 10G. But I’ve only seen that on bargain-bin hardware so I don’t know that they should be designing products around it.
I think you answered your own question - also the places where mmWave is available, there is also often other better internet connection options.
The whole 2.5 G spec is a weird step for ethernet speeds too. It's unfortunate it took off.
They said the same thing about 40G but hey, I've loved it for bridging the gap between my two (10G and 100G, respectively) Mikrotik switches. You can have a dozen Gigabit ports, as well as up to four true 10G devices on your aggregation switch, and neither would be bottlenecked by traffic to and from the backside. This has been a massive boon. However, when it comes to 2.5G, I struggle to find one good reason to use it; such a tiny step-up in bandwidth, and for what?
> However, when it comes to 2.5G, I struggle to find one good reason to use it; such a tiny step-up in bandwidth, and for what?
Portability and heat. You can get a small USB 2.5G adapter that produces negligible heat, but a Thunderbolt 10G adapter is large and produces a substantial amount of heat.
I use 10G at home, but the adapter I throw into my laptop bag is a tiny 2.5G adapter.
I’m sure it depends on the model, but in my experience if you force a 10G copper transceiver to 2.5G the insane heat generation goes away. I don’t have any Thunderbolt 10G adapters, but I’m kind of surprised they’re much larger. A SFP+ transceiver is the same size as a SFP one.
40G on Mikrotik is just channel bonding of 4 10G links at layer 2. It’s not like the vast majority of 100G that does layer 1 bonding. I really don’t know why they did it other than to have a bigger number on the spec sheet - I can’t imagine they save any money having a weird MAC setup almost nobody else uses on a few low-volume models.
1x PCIE 3.0 has 8 Gbps raw speed - for 2.5Gbps duplex Ethernet you'll need 6~7 Gbps of raw link to CPU.
For 5Gbps and higher, you'll need another PCIE line - and SOHO motherboards are usually already pretty tight on PCIE lanes.
10GbE will require 4x3.0 lanes
Are motherboards commonly using PCIe 3.0 for onboard peripherals these days? I wouldn’t expect it to save them much money, but my PCIe knowledge is constrained to the application layer - I know next to nothing about the PHY or associated costs.
This is got to be it!
I gotta say, I hate it when companies use “xxx bits per second”, whether its Mega or Giga nobody uses bits per second and for the average consumer it’s very unclear that this differs from bytes.
Having to explain to relatives and such that “yeah you actually have to divide that by 8” is a hassle and I get tricked by it subconsciously at times as well.
2 gbps meaning 250 megabytes per second is a SCAM. A marketing sham at it’s finest.
“I have 100 mbps download” meaning “I get 12.5 megabytes download per second” is ridiculous!!
Networking only uses bits/s. Nobody in the networking world talks in bytes/s, and pretty much nobody in the data transfer world does.
The only industry that talks in bytes/s is parts of the storage space, because they relate to files, that are measured in bytes/s. And even them use both: the data link is in bits/s (e.g. SATA 6 is 6Gbps, NVMe uses the same bits/s than PCIe (1)) while the drive is usually in bytes/s (µSD cards, NVMe SSDs, etc).
When you look at the industry at large, throughput is virtually always measured in bits/s. HDMI is in bits/s. Video codecs measures bitrates in bits/s. Audio codecs measures bitrates in bits/s. PCIe is in bits/s (1). Ethernet is measured in bits/s. Wifi is measured in bits/s. You get the picture.
The good thing about keeping it consistent is that values are relatable. Streaming services naturally talk in bitrate for the video quality, and your ISP also talks in bits/s. You can compare the two numbers. Bytes/s is only really useful for on the spot jobs that you do once, like transferring photos from an SD card to your computer. Otherwise, it's just a unit.
(1): ackhstually pcie measures speeds in transfers/s because they include the 8b10b/64b66b encoding overhead and TLP overhead but I digress.
If you really want to piss people off, use Gibibits - 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bits. The ratio between those and Gigabytes is ~7.451.
I honestly feel mibi and gibibytes per second are the easiest units to rationalise about. The data I am transferring is already known to me in its binary prefix unit. Seconds for that data to transfer is a trivial translation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
That’s not marketing related at all. It’s how network speeds have been measured long before ISPs were a business.
A byte per second is no more intuitive than a nibble per second or a bit per second. You might be used to byte as a power user because of storage, but I assure you that to regular people “256 gigabytes” is a meaningless number as well.
and how do you feel about HDD vendors (and Apple) using giga-/tera- for their strictly SI power-of-ten and not power-of-two meaning?
This ship sailed out of view a long time ago, the only GB you’ll see that is still base-2 is RAM. And that’s only because you literally can’t address physical RAM in non power-of-2 blocks in most architectures.
We're doing ads on HN now?
Sir, this might not be a Wendy's, but this is a VC owned site that regularly shills its questionable investments.
And for most of the people here, buying any 5G mmWave modem is a questionable investment.
I would speculate that most tech purchases by HN crowd are questionable investments. But life is not a spreadsheet.
I see you've never opened HN during an Apple product launch event
The majority of posts are ads on HN
Did you know there is an entire post category for ads and self-promotion? https://news.ycombinator.com/show