Back in July, Ars ran a syndicated piece from The Wirecutter on the best consumer-grade wireless access point, with the winner being the $100 Netgear EX6200. The result didn’t particularly move me—I’d been using an 802.11ac-capable Apple Airport Extreme since late 2013 and Wi-Fi in House Hutchinson seemed pretty much a solved problem. The Apple access point had been more expensive than just about any other consumer wireless gear when I’d picked it up, but it was solidly reliable, quite quick, and covered all 2,600 square feet (about 241 square meters) of the house without any noticeable dead spots.
But a few of the comments in the syndicated piece echoed a general dissatisfaction with the consumer wireless access point landscape and recommended we check out some entry-level "enterprise" wireless gear instead. This tickled my urge to tinker—if there’s one thing the latent sysadmin in me loves, it’s tearing out a perfectly functional existing production system and implementing something new from scratch!
So shortly after that piece ran, I reached out to Ubiquiti Networks, an enterprise networking gear manufacturer that makes, among other things, the types of mesh-capable Wi-Fi systems that often get installed in hotels and airports. I wanted to see what it was like to leave the kiddie pool of home Wi-Fi equipment and jump into the big pool—the shallow end, at least (the deep end would probably be bolting Cisco Aironet access points all over my house). My contact with Ubiquiti happened at a fortuitous time, too, since the company was in the process of redesigning its UniFi wireless access products.
I wound up with four different Ubiquiti UniFi wireless access points to test. Ubiquiti first sent two preproduction models, a UniFi AP-AC-Lite and a UniFi AP-AC-LR, and then followed them up a couple of weeks later with a production model UniFi AP-AC-LR and a production model UniFi AP-AC-Pro when they were ready. (There's a fourth UniFi model included with Ubiquiti's UniFi product refresh, the UAP-AC-EDU, but it's intended to be sold directly to educational institutions, and I didn't get one to test.)
| UAP-AC-LITE | UAP-AC-LR | UAP-AC-PRO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dimensions | 160 x 160 x 31.45mm | 175.7 x 175.7 x 43.2mm | 196.7 x 196.7 x 35mm |
| Weight | 170g | 240g | 350g |
| Radio | 802.11ac/n/b/g/a | 802.11ac/n/b/g/a | 802.11ac/n/b/g/a |
| 2.4GHz MIMO | 2x2 | 3x3 | 3x3 |
| 5GHz MIMO | 2x2 | 2x2 | 3x3 |
| Max 2.4GHz TX power | 20dBm | 24dBm | 22dBm |
| Max 5GHz TX power | 20dBm | 22dBm | 22dBm |
| Max rated range | 122 meters (400 feet) | 183 meters (600 feet) | 122 meters (400 feet) |
| Power over Ethernet | 24V passive | 24V passive | 802.3af / 802.3at |
| MSRP | $89 | $109 | $149 |
How I used and reviewed these things
One of the core ideas behind an enterprise-type Wi-Fi solution is that you can throw down multiple access points and manage them from a single interface while your wireless clients seamlessly (or nearly seamlessly) roam between the access points as needed. On top of that, enterprise Wi-Fi setups differ from home set-ups in that they typically offer the ability to configure multiple (as in dozens or more) of SSIDs from the same set of hardware, each with different security and networking policies applied. There’s also often rich guest network functionality, with the ability to allow guests to connect not just with a single password but also with timed-expiry passphrases or tokens, or to charge guests for access (like you might see in a hotel).
It’s important to set expectations here at the outset: this is not intended to be a comprehensive review of an enterprise Wi-Fi solution in an enterprise context. I’m not going to be presenting a discussion on how to do a pre-deployment RF survey to map out which frequencies you should assign, or how to set up RADIUS authentication, or how to support hundreds of wireless users, or how to use Paypal to charge guest users for access via the guest portal—I don’t have the equipment or expertise (or time!) to deliver that kind of review.
Instead, this will be a reasonably skilled sysadmin’s review of how "enterprise-grade" Wi-Fi gear works in a home context, detailing how a home user can benefit from the improvements brought to the table by using business-class gear instead of an endless, endlessly breaking series of disposable home networking access points. I’m going to go into my own use case for the UniFi wireless access points (WAPs) and how they fit into my life and provide a justification for why even after sending the review gear back, I’m planning on spending my own money and purchasing at least a pair of the devices so I can keep using them. In that regard, I'm like the guy who experienced a luxury hotel or a first-class airline seat and now can't bear the thought of going back to the way things used to be.
It is extremely important to state that these devices are not NAT routers. They are wireless access points, and that is all they are. They do not replace your existing router and you can not use them to connect your home LAN to the Internet. If you have an all-in-one wireless router, you’d add Ubiquiti’s WAPs to your network by disabling the Wi-Fi on your existing wireless router and leaving it otherwise intact and functional, with the router portion of the router still doing its job (the standalone UniFi Controller management application can do DHCP if that’s desired). Or if you want to keep everything within the Ubiquiti ecosystem and manage your router and WAPs with the same application, you could also purchase one of Ubiquiti’s security gateways.
I’ve been using Smoothwall Express for my router and firewall for probably 10 years, and I do DNS and DHCP off-box with bind9 and dhcpd (although Smoothwall can handle those roles as well). Smoothwall is an excellent and easy-to-manage Linux firewall distro with fully configurable rules and stateful packet inspection, and I have it running on a dual-NIC OEM 2550L2D in my closet. That means that the Airport Extreme I’ve been using for Wi-Fi has been strictly for Wi-Fi, and disconnecting it and plugging in the Ubiquiti gear to test with was straightforward. Again—and I know I’ve said this more than once, but it’s worth repeating—if you’re thinking of replacing your existing Wi-Fi setup with something like Ubiquiti’s gear, you need keep your existing router or account for the cost of buying a router to work with the new gear.
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