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SomeJoe7777

SomeJoe7777

Marginally-Known Member
Mar 28, 2015
2,286
6,147
Houston, TX
#1
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#2
SomeJoe7777 said:
FYI, if you want the best bang for the buck in wireless access points, use a Ubiquiti UniFi. The AC-LITE model is only $82, and it's an enterprise-class access point.

I own my own Managed IT Service Provider business, and the Ubiquiti line is what I install for my business clients.

Amazon.com: Ubiquiti Unifi Ap-AC Lite - Wireless Access Point - 802.11 B/A/G/n/AC (UAPACLITEUS): Computers & Accessories
Click to expand...

I want to get a couple HD's. is it worth the $300 each?
 
#4
K-MTG said:
I want to get a couple HD's. is it worth the $300 each?
Click to expand...

I wouldn't bother with the HDs for a home or home office scenario. Their big feature is multi-user MIMO which significantly increases available bandwidth for large groups of wireless clients. When I say large groups here, I mean 25+ users all trying to stream Netflix at the same time. Not going to happen in a home. Plus, that feature will only work if all the clients are on Wave 2 802.11ac radios, which are rare right now. Furthermore, the AC-HD access points just came out, and the firmware isn't mature yet.

As far as "better" access points go, yes, the Cisco/Ruckus/Aruba access points may have more features, more configurability, and can be better suited for large campus deployments in large corporate environments. But in my experience, the radio and antenna design is the biggest thing that will impact performance, and the Ubiquiti radios and antennas are second to none. And the Ubiquiti's are 1/10th the price. (A mid range Cisco Aironet is close to $1000.)
 
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#5
I agree with what SomeJoe7777 said above. The only thing I'd add is that some of the low-end Ruckus offerings (R500, R510, R600, R610) are pretty good bang for the buck too. I find Ruckus's antenna designs to be better than Ubiquiti/Cisco both due to true antenna beamforming allowing their APs to concentrate the full regulatory Tx power to a particular direction (extremely useful for aiming at troublesome clients such as an idiotically designed car with a wifi antenna on one mirror behind thermally insulated glass and metal :D), and also Ruckus AP's seem to have much better Rx sensitivity numbers (some are as low as -105dBm versus the -85dBm typical of other APs) which helps with staying associated to weak clients such as smartphones in pockets.

The MSRP for those Ruckus AP's are relatively high if every middleman wants their reseller margins. But if you look around on eBay and elsewhere, you can find some sellers willing to offload these APs at substantially below retail and easily at the AC-HD's price point.
 
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#7
Also, don't forget about the obsolescence of tech: Every 2 years or so, vendors (Qualcomm Atheros, Broadcom) release wifi chipsets that are noticeably superior to the previous ones, both in terms of newer 802.11xx features as well as better ability to serve existing clients. When 802.11ac Wave 1 Ruckus AP's (R700) first came on the market, I was able to get 200-300mbit on desktops at reasonable ranges. Swapping for a newer Ruckus R710, I now much more reliably see 300-400mbit at range. And this is the exact same Wave 1 desktop as before — the main difference is that the antenna design improved and also the wifi chip was replaced with a much faster dual-core chip with faster interconnect.

So, consider the balance between spending a lot of money on AP's today versus saving some of that money for an upgrade a few years down the road.
 
#8
I've been considering the UniFi line for awhile. What's the feel on the differences between the UAP-AC-LITE and UAP-AC-PRO?

What do you need to run the controller software? I was considering just spinning up a small Linux VM on a local hypervisor to run it.

Thanks for insights...

Bruce.

PS. Currently my house runs on two old Apple Airport Extremes and a slightly newer Apple Airport Express, all operating as 802.11b/g/n access points with a pfSense box as a router, and my Tesla seems fine talking to them.
 
#9
bmah said:
I've been considering the UniFi line for awhile. What's the feel on the differences between the UAP-AC-LITE and UAP-AC-PRO?

What do you need to run the controller software? I was considering just spinning up a small Linux VM on a local hypervisor to run it.

Thanks for insights...

Bruce.

PS. Currently my house runs on two old Apple Airport Extremes and a slightly newer Apple Airport Express, all operating as 802.11b/g/n access points with a pfSense box as a router, and my Tesla seems fine talking to them.
Click to expand...

I just switched everything to Ubiquiti this week so I ran across your post in doing some research. I went with two Pro's for the house and a Lite for the garage. The Pro's are faster, are better if you have a PoE switch installed, or if you have any devices that can take advantage of 3 x 3 MIMO. The Lites would work just fine though.

You can run the controller software on a lot of things including a basic PC, raspberry pi, or the cloudkey thing they sell. It doesn't need to be running all the time though. Once you install everything you don't have to have it running. I just have it installed on a PC that is on all the time in my house.
 
#10
hockeythug said:
I just switched everything to Ubiquiti this week so I ran across your post in doing some research. I went with two Pro's for the house and a Lite for the garage. The Pro's are faster, are better if you have a PoE switch installed, or if you have any devices that can take advantage of 3 x 3 MIMO. The Lites would work just fine though.

You can run the controller software on a lot of things including a basic PC, raspberry pi, or the cloudkey thing they sell. It doesn't need to be running all the time though. Once you install everything you don't have to have it running. I just have it installed on a PC that is on all the time in my house.
Click to expand...

Cool. So it turns out that in the meantime, I went ahead and switched the three Apple Airports in my earlier post to two UniFi AC-AP-LITEs. There's only two of the UniFi APs because they seem to cover my house about as well as the three Airports. I ended up putting the controller software on a FreeBSD VM that I'm using for various other network manage-y things (Nagios, Cacti, arpwatch, etc.). So far so good! I love being able to get an overall view of what's happening on the network on a single screen.

Oh yeah, the Tesla works fine with this setup too. At least as far as I can tell...it hasn't sent or received a lot of traffic since I re-did the wireless. It'd be a good test if oh say a software update were pushed out to it... :D

Bruce.
 
#11
bmah said:
Cool. So it turns out that in the meantime, I went ahead and switched the three Apple Airports in my earlier post to two UniFi AC-AP-LITEs. There's only two of the UniFi APs because they seem to cover my house about as well as the three Airports. I ended up putting the controller software on a FreeBSD VM that I'm using for various other network manage-y things (Nagios, Cacti, arpwatch, etc.). So far so good! I love being able to get an overall view of what's happening on the network on a single screen.

Oh yeah, the Tesla works fine with this setup too. At least as far as I can tell...it hasn't sent or received a lot of traffic since I re-did the wireless. It'd be a good test if oh say a software update were pushed out to it... :D

Bruce.
Click to expand...

The network traffic information is amazing. I wanted to get it all setup before the Model 3 so I can spy on it. I'm coming from Netgear crap so the interface is a huge upgrade.
 
#12
hockeythug said:
The network traffic information is amazing. I wanted to get it all setup before the Model 3 so I can spy on it. I'm coming from Netgear crap so the interface is a huge upgrade.
Click to expand...

I used Netgear SMB-class access points (ProSafe line) in a couple of deployments. They're not bad if you only have one or two of them to set up and manage. But the Ubiquiti products are on a different level altogether (and less expensive?!?).

You're probably aware that a lot (but not all) of the traffic we see to and from Teslas is encrypted (OpenVPN), so that makes it harder to learn things about its behavior. I'd expect the Model 3 to be the same in that regard.

Bruce.
 
#13
It’s still highly amusing to me how the rapid explosion in Internet speed increases and data usage demands (particularly in households with young social media users) have created a hole in the consumer wifi market, and effectively caused tech-savvy people to put on an IT hat and run their home networks like a business :)

I’m one of those who did the same, and it seems like the industry is starting to take a turn with the likes of Eero, Velop, Luma, and so on. But still, at this point, the enterprise offerings in this space are still highly compelling if you can get past the price point and also the learning curve.
 
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#14
Just upgraded to gigabit and put in an Orbi system with one router and one satellite. Impressed with the speed (using a dedicated 5ghz backhaul channel) and coverage extending out to my tesla in my detached garage. Don't get a lot of configuration or monitoring options, but for a consumer-grade system it seems good, and hopefully there will be some significant OTA updates.
 
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#15
bmah said:
I used Netgear SMB-class access points (ProSafe line) in a couple of deployments. They're not bad if you only have one or two of them to set up and manage. But the Ubiquiti products are on a different level altogether (and less expensive?!?).

You're probably aware that a lot (but not all) of the traffic we see to and from Teslas is encrypted (OpenVPN), so that makes it harder to learn things about its behavior. I'd expect the Model 3 to be the same in that regard.

Bruce.
Click to expand...

Figured. Still will be able to see how much data and when though which is already way better than what I could do on the R7000's I had.
 
#16
martinicus said:
Just upgraded to gigabit and put in an Orbi system with one router and one satellite. Impressed with the speed (using a dedicated 5ghz backhaul channel) and coverage extending out to my tesla in my detached garage. Don't get a lot of configuration or monitoring options, but for a consumer-grade system it seems good, and hopefully there will be some significant OTA updates.
Click to expand...

Orbi rocks! the range is amazing - I have a 3pack of the AC3000 from Costco and it can cover almost 1/3 of an acre! I had problems with the ring doorbell w/Orbi. I created a dedicated ssid (guest) for that and seems to have fixed it.

For IoT security I use this kind of setup: Know How... 315 Networking 102 - Part 4: 3 Dumb Routers | TWiT.TV so a separate wifi and router system for the IoT stuff. I guess one could use VLAN tagging but this is much easier to get setup and running and who doesn't have a spare router
 
#17
I was having a lot of difficulty with my MS staying connected to my home WiFi. Based on what I read on this forum, I went ahead and created a guest network for my Netgear Nighthawk router, aptly named Tesla - in hopes the name would somehow translate to a more comfortable connection for the car's finicky WiFi antenna. Now my Tesla WiFi icon stays solid since it now connects and stays connected as soon as I pull into the garage.
 
#18
Out of curiosity is it common for your car to connect to the network, upload/download about 120-140kbs for a few seconds, fall back down, disconnect and then reconnect and wash rinse & repeat. Just curious if this is the norm now when sending the video / pic packets from AP2 cars up to the mothership.

I have my car on a guest network isolated from the rest of my network so it has to connect to one device in the garage for wifi.
 
#19
I recently installed a 3 pack of the Google mesh routers. I went with Google since the routers can ALSO be connected with wired Ethernet, although there are design issues to be aware of before you wire everything up (basically, there is a main access point and the remote access points have to be downstream of that one off the google wifi's second Ethernet port). Anyways, excellent, far coverage so far. Even though hooking up the google mesh routers via Ethernet was possible, it wasn't as easy as it should be. There is still a hole in the market for an easy home mesh or wired multi access point wifi system that is easy to set up.
 
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