Can confirm. I’ve deployed 14 access points at one site for over 5-6 years, public WiFi, 200 simultaneous users on average, only 1 failed (was constantly rebooting). I’m pretty impressed and have been using UniFi for all my clients.
My experience has been equally good. I installed 16 of the UAP-AC Pro units on my network in 2018 and have suffered zero losses. Pretty amazing really.
I am about to do a small unifi wireless points and their switches at a school. At the end of the day you just cant beat the price. I did a smaller test deployment, and besides some tunning i had to do, it has been extremely reliable, easy to manage, and just so much cheaper. Pfsense and unifi is a great combo, and we are saving so much money.
How big is the school, if you don't mind me asking? I'm curious as to how other schools/districts run their network and wifi. Where I work, we use Ruckus APs and HP switches. We have around 15 schools and about 3 administrative sites. I think we have something like 100+ switches and several hundred APs. I wonder how well UniFi scales in large networks. We have just under 12k students and close to 1k staff members.
@@JJFlores197 my site has 100 AP's and 36 switches, that'll go up to about 44 switches when i've finished. You might need their enterprise cloudkey unit (1000+ Ubiquity devices and 10k+ clients) or simply instal the controller software on a decent PC. Mine runs on a reasonable desktop PC that's dedicated to just run that. We don't have nearly the number of users you do though so that might be worth getting an opinion on but in terms of hardware it shouldn't be an issue. Only caveat is i wouldn't be using them for the firewall / router side. Network distribution & switches + AP's are great though.
I'm not sure about schools, but government offices require AP's t be FIPS compliant and unifi is not, and have no plans to be. (I don't blame them). But you may want to check just to be sure.
@@JJFlores197 Oh dude my schools are tiny compared to yours we have 1600 students, not too much more than your staff lol . The one deployment i have as of right now, is 7 APs and 4 switches for our admin building to test. With the new school im doing 48 u6 pro APs, and 8 enterprise line of switches. as @dicemain199 said, Unifi should only be used for their APs and switches for Net distribution are amazing. Their firewall solution is not good, and extremely basic. for the firewall i love netgate/ pfsense+ if you want to go cheap all the way. I did for all my firewalls, and netgates 1541 boxes have been incredibly reliable.
Given the fairly low cost of the units and the lack of license fee's you can afford to keep a few units on the shelf. Plus 2% in 6 years is pretty good. I've had about the same % here in 7 years of using the AP's and no switches go OOO in the 4 years i've been using them.
Apart from the APs all the switching and routing gear I run at home is second-hand Ubiquiti UniFi and it’s all been solid for years. (APs are U6-Lites purchased new.)
Other than one USW-Aggregator that died the first week, haven't had any issues with my UI network gear. But UI camera gear hasn't been so great. I've had really bad luck with the doorbells and I somehow bricked a brand new bullet G3 that had been sitting in the box for a while.
Our office deploy has 5 Nano HDs that are 24/7 and 2 spares that are occasionally used for a remote office deploy when needed. They've been in place for a bit over 5 years now. I've had several ubiquiti devices in my home for many years (I want to say since 2014ish) - only had one failure, an old 24 port PoE EdgeSwitch from way-back. Power supply failure. I'm sure it would be stupid-simple to fix but I just haven't got around to it.
Would love to see real world stats of similar Cisco/Aruba/Ruckus/etc setups for the same timeframe. Obviously it comes to how much uptime is worth to you but would be interested to see nonetheless.
I've been using unifi ap's for well over 10 years and have deployed 100's, if not 1000's of them. So far they have been bulletproof! I do have to pull about 50 of them out of one location because of the reg change and they are required to be "FIPS" compliant. Which is just red tape crap.
My company has probably 60 sites with Unifi devices. No question they fall behind in terms of reliability compared to other enterprise options out there. I’ve replaced 3-4 switches, 1-2 firewall and 5-6 access points and I only manage maybe 10 of those 60 sites. Don’t be surprised to loose a device or two every couple years at large deployments. That said the software suite is good, updates usually run problem free and you’re paying substantially less than most enterprise brands without an ongoing subscription. Sometimes there is quirky software issues but there really is a lot to like with the Unifi product line and I don’t have an issue recommending them even for enterprise environments.
How do you identify failures with these access points? I've got some Unifi APs as well but no idea how I would know if they are failing.... maybe other than to ensure its powered on.
nice! I am curious about those 5 dead units...did they power up if you gave them 48v passive? I have seen some of the unifi devices fail in such a way.
We have 13 in our office and only 2 got replaced in the last 5-6 months. Funny, that after I removed them they started working again. Maybe they needed some rest.
The AC-Pro and AC-Lite seem to be having issues with the latest firmware. It seems a lot of people on the forums had to revert to older versions on them. I'm included in that in two I still have at a relatives house while I have no issues with my U6-Pros. A friend at work had the same issue with his before I even asked him about it and reverting firmware fixed it for him as well.
I’ve installed hundreds of ubiquiti devices and it comes down to specifics. I’ve had very few failures with APs, most network switches have been good aside from early US-16-150W. Every single USG has had it’s 12V DC power supply fail after a few years. Early UNVR with internal usb storage has also been a nightmare. The 1TB HDD that comes in the Cloud Key Gen2+ is also ‘guaranteed to fail’. However, yes it does seem to be true that newer ubiquiti hardware does seem to be more reliable than old.
Will bet the 5 dead ones would still power up with a poe injector. The ac pro models most common failure is where they stop negotiating poe but work with injector. Mostly dead but not all dead.
Recently had a less than year old enterprise switch fail we believe due to overheating. Room was not overly hot but the switch seemed to always be running hot to the touch. Not sure if too many PoE devices did it in but it looked like it was fine but behaved in an odd way causing lots of network issues.
Have tried the Unifi design tool, but am missing function for when a building has 2 or more floors. Also when the floors are from wood, concrete or concrete on metal decking. Because wifi signal goes through the floors and you can utilize that overlap or have add more ap's because signals are too weak.
I had problems with two switches so far! A 16 port PoE switch that PoE died, and a 48 port Enterprise switch! The 16 port was in the first three months of installing it, so it was covered by the warranty, but the Enterprise died after the warranty expired! It's very frustrating for a switch, specially one labeled as Enterprise to die as fast this one! And it is installed after a very good UPS, and under AC!! Very frustrating!
I have had maybe 1 or 2 nano's die on me. However i don't think they are rated to be underwater (it was half submerged and still working) and or soaked in chemicals. the ethernet port no longer had pins. i do suspect the nano's always had a little bug to them. devices would drop and generally act strange. U6 pro's that replaced them work fantastic.
Excuse me Tom, I would really like to see you do extensive testing of Ubiquiti's IPv6's issues. Specifically where IPv6 is essentially ignored by IDP/IPS, DPI, Traffic Rules, and traffic graphs. While their hardware may be good, I am finding their software to be severely lacking.
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS That's your choice, but consider this. A lot of people come to your channel for IT advice. When you review a product without disclosing that you don't use IPv6 people don't know that you are unaware of how things function when using IPv6. This is a disservice to your viewers who rely on the information you provide to make decisions. My two cents is that you should experiment with IPv6 and learn about it so that you can provide more in-depth reviews of the products you sell and service.
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS entirely your choice of course. However, if I may make a suggestion. A lot of people come to you to learn about firewalls, routers, etc. Overlooking the modern IPv6 protocol does your viewers a disservice because they probably expect feature parity, same with your customers (although I'm going to guess you do not enable IPv6 for them). Unfortunately in my experience with Ubiquiti that isn't the case.
It hurts me on a personal level that the hardware is this good because I dont like the management software :) But I will still use it for simpler deployments.
what is really annoying about people pushing Unifi products is that they never mention they are more than likely out of stock. Point in case is the UDR which has not been in stock for weeks. I do worry about choosing a supplier that can not manage its stock and manufacturing process correctly.
over 10 years of using unifi devices, 0 have failed, they have only been replaced because of upgrades and changes in the network. moving from an apartment with like... a controller runing on a garbage server, with a reused asus router, a USG, and a very old AC pro, to a dream machine pro, an 60w Unifi 8 port switch, and a nano HD, to the current setup of a dream machine SE, the new 16port pro max POE, the U7 Pro, that nano HD, a flex HD off that 60w switch, and lots of ethernet runs at the house we got a few years ago, everything is working fine, perfectly even.
In my modest installation, 3 WiFi Unifi antennas and one broken down in just over a year (so still under warranty) ... I'm going to spoil your positive statistics (sorry)
At the company that I work at, we have around 50 APs and 15-20 switches deployed on our locations. After more than 5 years, we never had a switch fail and only 2 APs that died. We get some oddly behaving APs from time to time. Usually resetting and readoption will fix those issues.
Thanks for the overview Tom. I've been using a full Unifi setup for my home since 2022, a UDM SE, USW Lite 8 PoE switch, and 2 APs (U6 LRs). A lot of your earlier videos and tutorials were helpful for me and one of the reasons I went with it back then. It's definitely a small and home focused deployment but it's also for a fulltime work from home setup, so I wanted to invest in something that would last and they have been very reliable so far, and as you said with the updates and improvements it seems to have been trending well. Definitely would like to see more tips/tricks and best practices for Unifi for a home power user or tinkerer, especially maybe for the security settings, etc. Thanks!
A quick (or not quick) video on how you and your team perform wifi site surveys. What do you look out for? What happens when there is no floor plan? Do you get recommendations on install from the client?
UNIFI has great deployment tools, but there is a lot to consider in the construction. But I'm not going to steal Tom's thunder. Looking forward to that video myself!
As an IT person, I hate my Unifi Router, Switch, Access Points, and Cameras because they just work. It really sucks that it works so well there is nothing for me to do.
10 cameras and one still under warranty. Died during an upgrade and impossible to get working afterwards. Shipment to Unifi and difficult return of a new one in exchange. Complicated after-sales service. This is just my personal experience...
Love these types of videos. Also, as an extension of this, pull out an older AP and see how it holds up against more modern use cases today. I'm using a nanoHD myself, but I generally don't use much WiFi, I'm just using ethernet.
I've also had a good reliability experience with UniFi networking gear. Been using it since 2018 and never had an AP or switch fail on me. Slightly different story with Protect gear. Had a early UNVR die on me due to that internal USB drive issue, and lost about three G4 bullet cameras out of about two dozen that have been deployed for at least five years. Technically, the cameras didn't die-- they just got really cloudy, like someone put a thin layer of vaseline on the lens. Tried physical cleaning, messing with settings, forget and re-adopt, all to no avail, so I just replaced them.
Hey @Lawrence Systems, Great video!!!! Question for you, I have been using a UAP AC Pro for the last few years and its been pretty damn good.. Recently though ive noticed it will reboot for no reason at all.. I only know when my wife or kids say "WIFI IS OUT". I then go to check the logs in my unifi controller which shows NOTHING, I even SSH'd into the device and havent found much. Would you say it would finally be time to upgrade to a new model? This one has been pretty solid and has good range but with more modern devices and the AP getting more use, Do you think it would be worth the upgrade? Thanks & great video!
In another set of stats, I have had Unifi gear at my home now for 6+ years and while I have added additional switches like the aggregator, 10g, I still have several of my original gear like my first 16-port POE. This gear has been in two homes and on 24x7.
As of November, I will have had my UAO-AC-Lite for 7 years. It has never had a major issue and is still going strong. My USW-24 has been going for 5 years.
Heh. My USG-3P that I bought last 2014 is still alive and kicking (except the external adapter), that's why I still couldn't get myself to get the UXG Max... :/ Edit: I forgot about the 2 Unifi AC AP Pro. Same time, still been with me since 2014, been to several buildings, but still fully working.
I've had the original green-LED APs, still work. Blew one up with 48V POE, bypassed the fault and still runs somewhere where 2.4G is fine. UAP AC Pro - rock solid, zero failures over at least 6 years (might be 8-10 but can't validate as I didn't write it down). Enterprise 6E, solid, several years zero issues when the cabling + power is good. More sensitive to cabling due to 2.5G uplink. The In-walls, non-enterprise Wifi 6 version - so that worked great for a few years, but without touching anything, one of them is now constantly dropping to FE uplink. Not sure why. Hoping to pick up an Enterprise IW version to replace it. Switches. I borked an SFP port on one of the 48 port original non-POE switches. I had the 24 port POE 250W model drop one of the port's POE. But that thing was in a super-dusty, hot environment and it has fans, so not the best environment. Currently running the 'series 2', Enterprise 24 Poe, 48 port Enterprise POE, bunch of aggregation and UDM Pro, UDM SE. U6LRs, all solid for several years. All-in-all, other than the perceived (?) increased sensitivity to cabling over time, no complaints. Honestly, not had much grief with Netgear and TPLink (basic, non-managed) switches that are rack-mounted or metal casing. Ripped out tons of old plastic 10-100 switches that failed though.
Where I have hit an issue is with the US-48-500W (Gen 1 48-port PoE switch). It seems these have a well known defect in their power supply. We have had 3 out of 10 fail over the course of 3 1/2 years. Was able to get one back online because one had a logic failure where the other two had a power supply failure, so used the power supply in the switch with the dead logic in one of the switches with a failed power supply. Have largely disabled PoE, only enabling on a few ports that really need it hoping to slow this failure rate. Have been replacing with the USW-Pro-48-PoE Gen 2 switch, plus using the Gen 2 switch for the phone system now for a total of 6 switches. So far 0 issues with the Gen 2 switch. One switch handles most of our specialty / PoE stuff for the data network and that is now a Gen 2 switch as the original Gen 1 switch assigned this job was the first switch to fail. Of course the phone network is doing all PoE devices all of the time, so glad that is not on Gen 1 switches, but instead the Gen 2 switch. Most of the Gen 2 switches are hooked up with redundant power, but so far none have had to use it. For The UAP-AC-LR and Pro, we have 14 that are primarily 3 years old, though I think the 2 Pros are more like 5 years old. So far 1 marked failed as we could not get it to pass traffic and two that have needed a reboot at some point after they stopped passing traffic. Not bad. In general, liking that Wi-Fi is reliable to the point where if there seems to be a networking issue, we just unplug the wired in connection and test on Wi-Fi. Before Unifi and before my time here, Wi-Fi was known as something that didn't really work. Even at my home, before I got into Unifi hardware, Wi-Fi was something that was always fought with issues no matter what I tried. Now Wi-Fi just works. Granted part of what I do is make sure there is enough signal strength where I need it as in I use more than one AP, but I was doing that before with other vendors and their stuff was just sucking and I couldn't seem to find someone who didn't have sucky Wi-Fi that I could also afford until I found Unifi APs. We have two redundant Cloud Key Gen 2 controllers. One has failed. The three US-16-XG aggregation switches are still good, granted the spare has been turned off for a while because the 2 active ones are still kicking strong. Have these hooked up with redundant power.
Bought one of their access points, it died within 10 months, replaced within the 12-month warranty. The second one died a few months later outside of the warranty period. What a garbage brand from my experience. Using some way cheaper TP-Link access point for years and it's still working.
Just ordered a wifi 7 Tp-Link ap to replace my AC Lite, looks like the 2.4ghz radio is crapping out. Had a good run but ngl I'm not the biggest fan of Ubiquity.
I installed 25 u6-lr and 25 u6-pro just over two years ago and the pros have been great but a bad batch of lr has seen us have to replace 18 of them. Luckily UniFi replaced them under warranty.
I used to work at an MSP and was the "unifi man" there. I installed lots of Unfi equipment over the years and can absolutely confirm, that their equipment is pretty reliable. Sure you have some DOAs but out in production we had near to zero failures. Now I am running my own MSP-Startup and of course still use Unifi, with a central Ubuntu Controller and lots of API-Scripts for monitoring. I would be so happy if they would release a official documentation to the API and made it more consistent.
@@Traumatree Because SNMP requires line of sight with the device itself. If i do it with the controller I just need to access the controller's Webinterface. Also, I use the API to enforce some settings across all my sites, like Update-Plans and even have it integrated with my PSA / Ticket system. For example, it creates a site in Unifi if I make a new Customer in my PSA-System, or it can create tickets in case fo an alarm and resolve those again if the alarm is no longer present.
UAC Pro and UAC LR access points have been utterly reliable for us in a half dozen warehouse environments. Probably somewhere near 100 deployed, stuck on hot warehouse roofs covered in forklift soot, zero failures in over 5 years now (or whenever the UAC Pro first came out)
how many of the U6-LR access points' LEDs have dimmed drastically? That's something I've noticed over the last year - year and a half of the initial batch i put up at work. I've verified the LEDs were actually on; but very dim. There used to be a setting to control the brightness; but i don't see it anymore. It's not something i would have changed. It's just something i'm wondering. I haven't felt it's worth my time to put in a ticket about it. I don't feel the need to replace them over the LEDs. We got them during the pandemic and supply chain issue shortly after they came out. I think i read about this being an issue with the early ones.
they all seem to dim with age(Unifi AP's and other), probably over-driven a bit or right from the led manufacture with overzealous specifications. some of the older AP-AC-LR are now dim enough you need to be in a dark room or place a hand to shield and your face close looking at an angle inside the units. other models are all doing the same, with age, that said, it's typical of all LED's to fade with age, especially with 24/7 on time. one way to solve that is dim them, by undercurrent/lower drive levels. I have & seen lots of older gear with dimming LED's, laptops, printers, surge protectors, monitors, tv's. well you get the idea, it happens and faster on the brighter high output models.
@@throttlebottle5906 Yea i would expect it on things 8+ years old; but i'm a little disappointed in something that's only 3 years old. I wouldn't have thought they'd be so over driven; but my original installed group are so dim you have to hold them up to your face and cover them to see the LEDs. It's not a show stopper, just a little disappointing.
With all the Ubiquiti equipment I’ve had, had a 24-port switch fail and 3 G4 cameras. However, the 3 cameras were mostly my fault. Still love my equipment though!
It's hard to do long term testing about wifi equipment just because the technology changes *relatively* quickly. We've had approx a dozen Unifi access points in service since 2016, BUT none of the original units are still in service. That said, they were shelved not because they stopped working, but because the tech evolved and we upgraded to the newer faster versions. We're now on the 3rd iteration of the equipment now, starting with the square access points (I forget the designation, honestly), moving up to the UAP-AC Pro APs, and now we have WiFi 6 Enterprise APs, as of shortly after their release date (which coincided with a move, so we upgraded because why not, not because we really had any actual problems with the WiFi 5 models). And actually, some of those older APs (the round AC Pro units, not the old square ones which were EOL'd and no longer supported, I should say) are still in service, moved to some low priority locations offsite.
Well, a sample size of one isn't much of an example. But, back in February of 2016 I installed a Unifi AP-AC-lite in my house. It replaced an ISP provided Actiontec router that just wasn't cutting it. Well, the Unifi AP is still up on the ceiling providing a solid connection to all the wireless devices in the household. Not a single hiccup in 8 years.
Other than the older Ubiquiti outdoor AirMax outdoor stuff, I've not had any issues with reliability. The AirMax stuff used to be notorious for Ethernet ports dropping down to 10Mbps over time. Their newer stuff has been good for us and has survived multiple Cat 3, Cat4, and even a Cat 5 hurricane. My Unifi stuff has been pretty reliable.
I’ve only deployed about 50 APs. Out of those, we have had one long range unit fail, and I may have one U6 lite failing. The failure modes have been kind of tricky, but I will give credit to unifi’s customer support. It has been very good.
I don't deal with large deployments, only what I have at home but my U6-Mesh died after less than 2 years in use but Ubiquiti replaced it with a brand new unit in the retail package with all the accessories they come with. I'm glad to hear that it seems like they're failure rate is low and I don't have to worry too much about it happening again. I also have an even older AP-FlexHD and just got a U7-Pro while waiting for my U6-Mesh replacement.
I worked for some wireless ISPs when I was in California. While I was there, I think that they had a very small percentage of general failures with Ubiquity equipment. Probably had more failures from lightning strikes and damaged cables than anything else. And they probably had three thousand units in the field. Some failed under warranty and were replaced, but most outlasted the warranty.
As always, a great video. I sometimes worry about UniFi because for the good and great stories like this one, there’s always someone talking about how they’ve had horrible issues. I like the products personally in my consulting business. They’ve been pretty solid in my experience. I have recently had the darnedest time migrating to a new controller. I wound up having to go and climb a ladder to hard reset AP’s which is a pain. I made the mistake of not knowing that the ssh password was different than the login password. That’s on me. But the migration wasn’t easy and as I support these remotely, it makes it more difficult. I think it’s a great product other than that in my opinion
that sounds like it was nearby lightning strike induced surge or it could be someone with very high RF output device inducing high RF currents in it(CB/HAM radio), if it's close to a road/expressway or large parking lot where they test or play around.
Can confirm. I’ve deployed 14 access points at one site for over 5-6 years, public WiFi, 200 simultaneous users on average, only 1 failed (was constantly rebooting). I’m pretty impressed and have been using UniFi for all my clients.
Thank you, it is rare to see someone look at the longer-term reliability of products they review and install.
AP-AC-Pro hooked up in 2017. Has been going strong 24/7. Started with poe injector then switched to a poe switch. Still very happy 😊
My experience has been equally good. I installed 16 of the UAP-AC Pro units on my network in 2018 and have suffered zero losses. Pretty amazing really.
These have been amazing for longgevity
I am about to do a small unifi wireless points and their switches at a school. At the end of the day you just cant beat the price. I did a smaller test deployment, and besides some tunning i had to do, it has been extremely reliable, easy to manage, and just so much cheaper. Pfsense and unifi is a great combo, and we are saving so much money.
How big is the school, if you don't mind me asking? I'm curious as to how other schools/districts run their network and wifi. Where I work, we use Ruckus APs and HP switches. We have around 15 schools and about 3 administrative sites. I think we have something like 100+ switches and several hundred APs. I wonder how well UniFi scales in large networks. We have just under 12k students and close to 1k staff members.
@@JJFlores197 my site has 100 AP's and 36 switches, that'll go up to about 44 switches when i've finished. You might need their enterprise cloudkey unit (1000+ Ubiquity devices and 10k+ clients) or simply instal the controller software on a decent PC. Mine runs on a reasonable desktop PC that's dedicated to just run that. We don't have nearly the number of users you do though so that might be worth getting an opinion on but in terms of hardware it shouldn't be an issue.
Only caveat is i wouldn't be using them for the firewall / router side. Network distribution & switches + AP's are great though.
I'm not sure about schools, but government offices require AP's t be FIPS compliant and unifi is not, and have no plans to be. (I don't blame them). But you may want to check just to be sure.
@@JJFlores197 Oh dude my schools are tiny compared to yours we have 1600 students, not too much more than your staff lol . The one deployment i have as of right now, is 7 APs and 4 switches for our admin building to test. With the new school im doing 48 u6 pro APs, and 8 enterprise line of switches.
as @dicemain199 said, Unifi should only be used for their APs and switches for Net distribution are amazing. Their firewall solution is not good, and extremely basic. for the firewall i love netgate/ pfsense+ if you want to go cheap all the way. I did for all my firewalls, and netgates 1541 boxes have been incredibly reliable.
2019 installed Unifi AC Lite installed at home still going strong. Wish for wifi 6/7 speeds but Ubiquiti is getting really expensive here (Malaysia)
Given the fairly low cost of the units and the lack of license fee's you can afford to keep a few units on the shelf. Plus 2% in 6 years is pretty good. I've had about the same % here in 7 years of using the AP's and no switches go OOO in the 4 years i've been using them.
Apart from the APs all the switching and routing gear I run at home is second-hand Ubiquiti UniFi and it’s all been solid for years. (APs are U6-Lites purchased new.)
Just bought my first Unify-U7 Pro to replace my RX7800 Netgear. Other than not supporting VLANS direction, or having a webpage access, I love it.
Other than one USW-Aggregator that died the first week, haven't had any issues with my UI network gear. But UI camera gear hasn't been so great. I've had really bad luck with the doorbells and I somehow bricked a brand new bullet G3 that had been sitting in the box for a while.
Our office deploy has 5 Nano HDs that are 24/7 and 2 spares that are occasionally used for a remote office deploy when needed. They've been in place for a bit over 5 years now. I've had several ubiquiti devices in my home for many years (I want to say since 2014ish) - only had one failure, an old 24 port PoE EdgeSwitch from way-back. Power supply failure. I'm sure it would be stupid-simple to fix but I just haven't got around to it.
Yes, please do more long term reliability vids!
Would love to see real world stats of similar Cisco/Aruba/Ruckus/etc setups for the same timeframe. Obviously it comes to how much uptime is worth to you but would be interested to see nonetheless.
I've been using unifi ap's for well over 10 years and have deployed 100's, if not 1000's of them. So far they have been bulletproof! I do have to pull about 50 of them out of one location because of the reg change and they are required to be "FIPS" compliant. Which is just red tape crap.
I wanted to add that features, reliability, and especially not having a subscription are why I choose Ubiquity over other products .
My company has probably 60 sites with Unifi devices.
No question they fall behind in terms of reliability compared to other enterprise options out there.
I’ve replaced 3-4 switches, 1-2 firewall and 5-6 access points and I only manage maybe 10 of those 60 sites.
Don’t be surprised to loose a device or two every couple years at large deployments. That said the software suite is good, updates usually run problem free and you’re paying substantially less than most enterprise brands without an ongoing subscription.
Sometimes there is quirky software issues but there really is a lot to like with the Unifi product line and I don’t have an issue recommending them even for enterprise environments.
Thanks, this was a great update. Keep providing these updates please.
Yes, this is good video, keep following up
Previous company I worked for: had ~9 year site, was still working when I left, no failures that I know of.
How do you identify failures with these access points? I've got some Unifi APs as well but no idea how I would know if they are failing.... maybe other than to ensure its powered on.
nice! I am curious about those 5 dead units...did they power up if you gave them 48v passive? I have seen some of the unifi devices fail in such a way.
We have 13 in our office and only 2 got replaced in the last 5-6 months. Funny, that after I removed them they started working again. Maybe they needed some rest.
The AC-Pro and AC-Lite seem to be having issues with the latest firmware. It seems a lot of people on the forums had to revert to older versions on them. I'm included in that in two I still have at a relatives house while I have no issues with my U6-Pros. A friend at work had the same issue with his before I even asked him about it and reverting firmware fixed it for him as well.
I’ve installed hundreds of ubiquiti devices and it comes down to specifics. I’ve had very few failures with APs, most network switches have been good aside from early US-16-150W. Every single USG has had it’s 12V DC power supply fail after a few years. Early UNVR with internal usb storage has also been a nightmare. The 1TB HDD that comes in the Cloud Key Gen2+ is also ‘guaranteed to fail’.
However, yes it does seem to be true that newer ubiquiti hardware does seem to be more reliable than old.
Will bet the 5 dead ones would still power up with a poe injector. The ac pro models most common failure is where they stop negotiating poe but work with injector. Mostly dead but not all dead.
Recently had a less than year old enterprise switch fail we believe due to overheating. Room was not overly hot but the switch seemed to always be running hot to the touch. Not sure if too many PoE devices did it in but it looked like it was fine but behaved in an odd way causing lots of network issues.
Have tried the Unifi design tool, but am missing function for when a building has 2 or more floors. Also when the floors are from wood, concrete or concrete on metal decking. Because wifi signal goes through the floors and you can utilize that overlap or have add more ap's because signals are too weak.
192 UAP-HDs and 72 switches installed October 2020. 1 ap failed in that time.
I had problems with two switches so far! A 16 port PoE switch that PoE died, and a 48 port Enterprise switch! The 16 port was in the first three months of installing it, so it was covered by the warranty, but the Enterprise died after the warranty expired! It's very frustrating for a switch, specially one labeled as Enterprise to die as fast this one! And it is installed after a very good UPS, and under AC!! Very frustrating!
I have had maybe 1 or 2 nano's die on me. However i don't think they are rated to be underwater (it was half submerged and still working) and or soaked in chemicals. the ethernet port no longer had pins. i do suspect the nano's always had a little bug to them. devices would drop and generally act strange. U6 pro's that replaced them work fantastic.
I have 3 x 5 year old uap AC pro gen 2.
They are running today
Are all of the switches still working still?
Yup
I purchased two IW-HD’s and the 5ghz channels on both of them went bad in about 6 years.
I just got an update for my fleet of unifi6 LR's and it bricked each one. and they wont warranty/rmi them so I am thinking of ditching unfi...
Seems new access points get so hot they require a fan, wonder how long those will last.
Excuse me Tom, I would really like to see you do extensive testing of Ubiquiti's IPv6's issues. Specifically where IPv6 is essentially ignored by IDP/IPS, DPI, Traffic Rules, and traffic graphs. While their hardware may be good, I am finding their software to be severely lacking.
I don't use IPV6
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS That's your choice, but consider this. A lot of people come to your channel for IT advice. When you review a product without disclosing that you don't use IPv6 people don't know that you are unaware of how things function when using IPv6. This is a disservice to your viewers who rely on the information you provide to make decisions.
My two cents is that you should experiment with IPv6 and learn about it so that you can provide more in-depth reviews of the products you sell and service.
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS entirely your choice of course. However, if I may make a suggestion. A lot of people come to you to learn about firewalls, routers, etc. Overlooking the modern IPv6 protocol does your viewers a disservice because they probably expect feature parity, same with your customers (although I'm going to guess you do not enable IPv6 for them). Unfortunately in my experience with Ubiquiti that isn't the case.
It hurts me on a personal level that the hardware is this good because I dont like the management software :) But I will still use it for simpler deployments.
I have tplink router 15 year old. Wifi routers mostly don't die.
what is really annoying about people pushing Unifi products is that they never mention they are more than likely out of stock. Point in case is the UDR which has not been in stock for weeks. I do worry about choosing a supplier that can not manage its stock and manufacturing process correctly.
Good things come to those who wait.
over 10 years of using unifi devices, 0 have failed, they have only been replaced because of upgrades and changes in the network. moving from an apartment with like... a controller runing on a garbage server, with a reused asus router, a USG, and a very old AC pro, to a dream machine pro, an 60w Unifi 8 port switch, and a nano HD, to the current setup of a dream machine SE, the new 16port pro max POE, the U7 Pro, that nano HD, a flex HD off that 60w switch, and lots of ethernet runs at the house we got a few years ago, everything is working fine, perfectly even.
good info
In my modest installation, 3 WiFi Unifi antennas and one broken down in just over a year (so still under warranty) ... I'm going to spoil your positive statistics (sorry)
6 years for me, 3 out of about 25 died.
Sponsored by Ubiquiti!!
Haha, nope!
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS was joking ofcourse. Thanks for the vid.
Thank you daddy
First
At the company that I work at, we have around 50 APs and 15-20 switches deployed on our locations. After more than 5 years, we never had a switch fail and only 2 APs that died. We get some oddly behaving APs from time to time. Usually resetting and readoption will fix those issues.
2 of 50 is a 4% failure rate, higher than Lawrences 1.7% rate.
Thanks for the overview Tom. I've been using a full Unifi setup for my home since 2022, a UDM SE, USW Lite 8 PoE switch, and 2 APs (U6 LRs). A lot of your earlier videos and tutorials were helpful for me and one of the reasons I went with it back then.
It's definitely a small and home focused deployment but it's also for a fulltime work from home setup, so I wanted to invest in something that would last and they have been very reliable so far, and as you said with the updates and improvements it seems to have been trending well.
Definitely would like to see more tips/tricks and best practices for Unifi for a home power user or tinkerer, especially maybe for the security settings, etc. Thanks!
A quick (or not quick) video on how you and your team perform wifi site surveys. What do you look out for? What happens when there is no floor plan? Do you get recommendations on install from the client?
A video about that is in the works right now
UNIFI has great deployment tools, but there is a lot to consider in the construction. But I'm not going to steal Tom's thunder. Looking forward to that video myself!
After 6-7 years of using Unifi, I’ve hade a Gen 1 controller fail , and the 2.4 GHz radio on my wifi 5 AC-Lite has bitten the dust.
As an IT person, I hate my Unifi Router, Switch, Access Points, and Cameras because they just work. It really sucks that it works so well there is nothing for me to do.
10 cameras and one still under warranty. Died during an upgrade and impossible to get working afterwards. Shipment to Unifi and difficult return of a new one in exchange. Complicated after-sales service. This is just my personal experience...
Love these types of videos.
Also, as an extension of this, pull out an older AP and see how it holds up against more modern use cases today.
I'm using a nanoHD myself, but I generally don't use much WiFi, I'm just using ethernet.
Thank you so much for sharing this kind of reliability information.
Nice to see the results of some real-world experiences.
I've also had a good reliability experience with UniFi networking gear. Been using it since 2018 and never had an AP or switch fail on me. Slightly different story with Protect gear. Had a early UNVR die on me due to that internal USB drive issue, and lost about three G4 bullet cameras out of about two dozen that have been deployed for at least five years. Technically, the cameras didn't die-- they just got really cloudy, like someone put a thin layer of vaseline on the lens. Tried physical cleaning, messing with settings, forget and re-adopt, all to no avail, so I just replaced them.
Hey @Lawrence Systems, Great video!!!! Question for you, I have been using a UAP AC Pro for the last few years and its been pretty damn good.. Recently though ive noticed it will reboot for no reason at all.. I only know when my wife or kids say "WIFI IS OUT". I then go to check the logs in my unifi controller which shows NOTHING, I even SSH'd into the device and havent found much. Would you say it would finally be time to upgrade to a new model? This one has been pretty solid and has good range but with more modern devices and the AP getting more use, Do you think it would be worth the upgrade? Thanks & great video!
In another set of stats, I have had Unifi gear at my home now for 6+ years and while I have added additional switches like the aggregator, 10g, I still have several of my original gear like my first 16-port POE. This gear has been in two homes and on 24x7.
As of November, I will have had my UAO-AC-Lite for 7 years. It has never had a major issue and is still going strong. My USW-24 has been going for 5 years.
If ubiquiti would only reapply for their FIPS certification
Heh. My USG-3P that I bought last 2014 is still alive and kicking (except the external adapter), that's why I still couldn't get myself to get the UXG Max... :/
Edit: I forgot about the 2 Unifi AC AP Pro. Same time, still been with me since 2014, been to several buildings, but still fully working.
I've had the original green-LED APs, still work. Blew one up with 48V POE, bypassed the fault and still runs somewhere where 2.4G is fine.
UAP AC Pro - rock solid, zero failures over at least 6 years (might be 8-10 but can't validate as I didn't write it down).
Enterprise 6E, solid, several years zero issues when the cabling + power is good. More sensitive to cabling due to 2.5G uplink.
The In-walls, non-enterprise Wifi 6 version - so that worked great for a few years, but without touching anything, one of them is now constantly dropping to FE uplink. Not sure why. Hoping to pick up an Enterprise IW version to replace it.
Switches. I borked an SFP port on one of the 48 port original non-POE switches. I had the 24 port POE 250W model drop one of the port's POE. But that thing was in a super-dusty, hot environment and it has fans, so not the best environment. Currently running the 'series 2', Enterprise 24 Poe, 48 port Enterprise POE, bunch of aggregation and UDM Pro, UDM SE. U6LRs, all solid for several years. All-in-all, other than the perceived (?) increased sensitivity to cabling over time, no complaints.
Honestly, not had much grief with Netgear and TPLink (basic, non-managed) switches that are rack-mounted or metal casing. Ripped out tons of old plastic 10-100 switches that failed though.
I have 2 UniFi AC Lites running smoothly since April 2017..
Where I have hit an issue is with the US-48-500W (Gen 1 48-port PoE switch). It seems these have a well known defect in their power supply. We have had 3 out of 10 fail over the course of 3 1/2 years. Was able to get one back online because one had a logic failure where the other two had a power supply failure, so used the power supply in the switch with the dead logic in one of the switches with a failed power supply. Have largely disabled PoE, only enabling on a few ports that really need it hoping to slow this failure rate. Have been replacing with the USW-Pro-48-PoE Gen 2 switch, plus using the Gen 2 switch for the phone system now for a total of 6 switches. So far 0 issues with the Gen 2 switch. One switch handles most of our specialty / PoE stuff for the data network and that is now a Gen 2 switch as the original Gen 1 switch assigned this job was the first switch to fail. Of course the phone network is doing all PoE devices all of the time, so glad that is not on Gen 1 switches, but instead the Gen 2 switch. Most of the Gen 2 switches are hooked up with redundant power, but so far none have had to use it.
For The UAP-AC-LR and Pro, we have 14 that are primarily 3 years old, though I think the 2 Pros are more like 5 years old. So far 1 marked failed as we could not get it to pass traffic and two that have needed a reboot at some point after they stopped passing traffic. Not bad. In general, liking that Wi-Fi is reliable to the point where if there seems to be a networking issue, we just unplug the wired in connection and test on Wi-Fi. Before Unifi and before my time here, Wi-Fi was known as something that didn't really work. Even at my home, before I got into Unifi hardware, Wi-Fi was something that was always fought with issues no matter what I tried. Now Wi-Fi just works. Granted part of what I do is make sure there is enough signal strength where I need it as in I use more than one AP, but I was doing that before with other vendors and their stuff was just sucking and I couldn't seem to find someone who didn't have sucky Wi-Fi that I could also afford until I found Unifi APs.
We have two redundant Cloud Key Gen 2 controllers. One has failed.
The three US-16-XG aggregation switches are still good, granted the spare has been turned off for a while because the 2 active ones are still kicking strong. Have these hooked up with redundant power.
Bought one of their access points, it died within 10 months, replaced within the 12-month warranty. The second one died a few months later outside of the warranty period. What a garbage brand from my experience. Using some way cheaper TP-Link access point for years and it's still working.
Just ordered a wifi 7 Tp-Link ap to replace my AC Lite, looks like the 2.4ghz radio is crapping out. Had a good run but ngl I'm not the biggest fan of Ubiquity.
5 of 283 is 1.7%.. Not bad. But, I wonder what other manufacturers have? Aruba, Cisco, etc?
I installed 25 u6-lr and 25 u6-pro just over two years ago and the pros have been great but a bad batch of lr has seen us have to replace 18 of them. Luckily UniFi replaced them under warranty.
Ofcourse you do, Unifi brings audience and videos views, they are a success story.
These are the best internet access frisbees ever.
I used to work at an MSP and was the "unifi man" there. I installed lots of Unfi equipment over the years and can absolutely confirm, that their equipment is pretty reliable. Sure you have some DOAs but out in production we had near to zero failures. Now I am running my own MSP-Startup and of course still use Unifi, with a central Ubuntu Controller and lots of API-Scripts for monitoring. I would be so happy if they would release a official documentation to the API and made it more consistent.
What API are you using and why? Why not use software like PRTG and monitor via SNMP ?
@@Traumatree Because SNMP requires line of sight with the device itself. If i do it with the controller I just need to access the controller's Webinterface. Also, I use the API to enforce some settings across all my sites, like Update-Plans and even have it integrated with my PSA / Ticket system. For example, it creates a site in Unifi if I make a new Customer in my PSA-System, or it can create tickets in case fo an alarm and resolve those again if the alarm is no longer present.
UAC Pro and UAC LR access points have been utterly reliable for us in a half dozen warehouse environments. Probably somewhere near 100 deployed, stuck on hot warehouse roofs covered in forklift soot, zero failures in over 5 years now (or whenever the UAC Pro first came out)
@tomlawrence: Do you use Unifi in conjunction with pfsense?
Yes
how many of the U6-LR access points' LEDs have dimmed drastically? That's something I've noticed over the last year - year and a half of the initial batch i put up at work. I've verified the LEDs were actually on; but very dim. There used to be a setting to control the brightness; but i don't see it anymore. It's not something i would have changed. It's just something i'm wondering. I haven't felt it's worth my time to put in a ticket about it. I don't feel the need to replace them over the LEDs.
We got them during the pandemic and supply chain issue shortly after they came out. I think i read about this being an issue with the early ones.
LEDs do die over time, especially if overdriven. And overdriving LEDs is super common sadly.
they all seem to dim with age(Unifi AP's and other), probably over-driven a bit or right from the led manufacture with overzealous specifications. some of the older AP-AC-LR are now dim enough you need to be in a dark room or place a hand to shield and your face close looking at an angle inside the units.
other models are all doing the same, with age, that said, it's typical of all LED's to fade with age, especially with 24/7 on time. one way to solve that is dim them, by undercurrent/lower drive levels. I have & seen lots of older gear with dimming LED's, laptops, printers, surge protectors, monitors, tv's. well you get the idea, it happens and faster on the brighter high output models.
@@throttlebottle5906 Yea i would expect it on things 8+ years old; but i'm a little disappointed in something that's only 3 years old. I wouldn't have thought they'd be so over driven; but my original installed group are so dim you have to hold them up to your face and cover them to see the LEDs. It's not a show stopper, just a little disappointing.
With all the Ubiquiti equipment I’ve had, had a 24-port switch fail and 3 G4 cameras. However, the 3 cameras were mostly my fault. Still love my equipment though!
It's hard to do long term testing about wifi equipment just because the technology changes *relatively* quickly. We've had approx a dozen Unifi access points in service since 2016, BUT none of the original units are still in service. That said, they were shelved not because they stopped working, but because the tech evolved and we upgraded to the newer faster versions. We're now on the 3rd iteration of the equipment now, starting with the square access points (I forget the designation, honestly), moving up to the UAP-AC Pro APs, and now we have WiFi 6 Enterprise APs, as of shortly after their release date (which coincided with a move, so we upgraded because why not, not because we really had any actual problems with the WiFi 5 models). And actually, some of those older APs (the round AC Pro units, not the old square ones which were EOL'd and no longer supported, I should say) are still in service, moved to some low priority locations offsite.
Well, a sample size of one isn't much of an example. But, back in February of 2016 I installed a Unifi AP-AC-lite in my house. It replaced an ISP provided Actiontec router that just wasn't cutting it. Well, the Unifi AP is still up on the ceiling providing a solid connection to all the wireless devices in the household. Not a single hiccup in 8 years.
Other than the older Ubiquiti outdoor AirMax outdoor stuff, I've not had any issues with reliability. The AirMax stuff used to be notorious for Ethernet ports dropping down to 10Mbps over time. Their newer stuff has been good for us and has survived multiple Cat 3, Cat4, and even a Cat 5 hurricane.
My Unifi stuff has been pretty reliable.
I’ve only deployed about 50 APs. Out of those, we have had one long range unit fail, and I may have one U6 lite failing. The failure modes have been kind of tricky, but I will give credit to unifi’s customer support. It has been very good.
I don't deal with large deployments, only what I have at home but my U6-Mesh died after less than 2 years in use but Ubiquiti replaced it with a brand new unit in the retail package with all the accessories they come with. I'm glad to hear that it seems like they're failure rate is low and I don't have to worry too much about it happening again. I also have an even older AP-FlexHD and just got a U7-Pro while waiting for my U6-Mesh replacement.
I worked for some wireless ISPs when I was in California. While I was there, I think that they had a very small percentage of general failures with Ubiquity equipment. Probably had more failures from lightning strikes and damaged cables than anything else. And they probably had three thousand units in the field. Some failed under warranty and were replaced, but most outlasted the warranty.
As always, a great video. I sometimes worry about UniFi because for the good and great stories like this one, there’s always someone talking about how they’ve had horrible issues.
I like the products personally in my consulting business. They’ve been pretty solid in my experience.
I have recently had the darnedest time migrating to a new controller. I wound up having to go and climb a ladder to hard reset AP’s which is a pain. I made the mistake of not knowing that the ssh password was different than the login password. That’s on me. But the migration wasn’t easy and as I support these remotely, it makes it more difficult.
I think it’s a great product other than that in my opinion
I have had several of the old long range ones fail. Will try to find the exact model name.
Pretty solid !!!
Had 2 U6Pros. One died and took poe port in a switch with it. Probably external surge
that sounds like it was nearby lightning strike induced surge or it could be someone with very high RF output device inducing high RF currents in it(CB/HAM radio), if it's close to a road/expressway or large parking lot where they test or play around.
first