After a long time fiddling with different Powerline products, wifi repeaters, network cables throughout the house, finally decided to purchase a Unifi AP and have absolutely no regrets! Only regret I have is that I didn't purchase this AP sooner. Man man man what a relief and enrichment.
Ok the Unifi APs require a controller, just like for example Cisco and Sophos require. The AP is in fact a dumb device and the controller controls the configuration of the AP and 'controlled' the WiFi network, this briefly explained.
Ubiquiti has really put a top product on the market with their Unifi APs. And no, I don't own any shares, stupid by the way, but that aside. Anyone who finally wants to have a super coverage and powerful WiFi network is failing not to go for Unifi.
The installation did not go completely smoothly as I expected after reading all the reviews, but partly because of that I also got things up and running quickly. Connected the AP to my POE switch, installed the controller tool on my laptop and hoppa through the wizard that at the end gives a huge error message and the installation cannot be completed. However, the specified configuration was transferred to the AP and after a number of skip actions in the wizard I was able to arrive at the controller login page. Ubiquiti should give this some attention.
Quickly set up 3 WiFi networks. 1 for my laptop, 1 for all phones/tablets/laptops of the rest of the family and 1 guest network. After that 2 User Groups were created and a maximum upload/download linked to those 2 groups. Just for convenience, those 2 groups together can now use no more than 20000KBPS up/down of my 100Mbit Fiber. The set limits are exactly enforced! Haven't heard anyone complain, least of all me. And yes I think this is a fair distribution ;-)
I hesitated about the placement for a while and have placed the AP in different locations to see how I can generate the most optimal coverage throughout the house. Ultimately opted for the 1st floor (living room) against the wall and not against the ceiling. This is simply the most logical place and that is what my measurements indicated. To measure is to know. Due to the composition of each house, type of materials, furniture placement, open staircase or not, etc etc, this will of course differ for each house.
Where I was normally regularly thrown out of conference calls due to faltering Wifi or a reset of my Powerline products, I have now been able to run conference calls with Video flawlessly throughout the house for a number of days without ever flying out of a call by 1 or other network reset!
All my downloads over Wifi now also use the full available 100Mbit throughout the house that I pay for. Happy happy happy happy!
Because I don't want to run the controller on my laptop, there are a number of options.
Do not use a controller at all, the AP now has the config in sight, is not an option for me because I want to see what the AP does and fiddle with the necessary settings. Mind you, even for the non-freubelaars this AP is a gem because of the quality and strength of the radios and their coverage. If you can't get through the wizard let someone with more knowledge do it and you can enjoy!
Another option is to use a NUC, a small Intel barebone PC that I already had under the TV. Installed the controller software on this, unfortunately with a single Unifi AP you can only have 1 active controller and that was my laptop. Ok no problem, forum indicates, just perform an adopt in the new controller and you can manage the AP, that's right, but then you will also lose your entire config. Oops and I didn't make a backup yet because I was having so much fun. Good config popped in and running again.
The disadvantage is that when adjusting a minimum setting on 1 of the WiFi networks, all radios are reset. Perhaps something can be done about this in a future update. But when it runs, it runs well!
Another option is to run the controller on your Synology NAS! Wooow went crazy when I read about this! I became less mad when it turned out that my non-Intel CPU of my DS216PLAY (yes from Coolblue how cool is that!) could cause the necessary issues because the developers hadn't really tested with this yet. Of course I tried everything, followed the steps well, installed Java, installed MongoDB and finally dared to click on the Unifi Controller 5. Unfortunately, things went wrong here. I'm still debugging but don't expect much. (synology.acmenet.ru)
What I expect a lot from is the fact that Ubiquiti recently apparently called Synology to discuss how they can get the controller on all NAS. See, that makes me even more happy!
Hope no one fell asleep reading my review, if you've made it this far I hope it's of some use to you. In any case, I am now a fan of Ubiquiti and their Unifi APÂs and highly recommend it despite the strange wizard that just won't close
