My company is currently rolling out android based barcode scanners for our warehouse
I’ve deployed multiple unifi devices on multiple sites.
Currently I am planning to do meshing in our warehouse to support these barcode scanners.
We are planning on expansion, a new office building and changes to our warehouse in about 1 year.
When we undergo construction they will also install multiple patch positions in our warehouse, there are currently none.
As I only need to do meshing for about 1 year before all the AP’s are wired up I’m wondering which AP I should consider since all of them support meshing. I don’t really need high throughputs but I need it to be stable.
Our warehouse is C shaped around our office. The office already has 3 Unifi AP AC Lite’s
The devices would be mounted to the steel H-bars that carry the roof and would have a clear view of each other as our racks aren’t all the way up to the sealing. The roof is at 6-10 meters depending on which are you are in.
I’ve done basic measurements with an Unifi AP AC Lite to get an idea of placement.
But our warehouse is only half stocked at this time so this will need adjusting later.
I listed these devices because I want to try to keep the price around € 100 a piece. If the AC-Pro or Mesh Pro are much better choices here then I can make room in the budget for those.
Are the AP AC lite’s suiteable for a stable uplink or would you recommend replacing these with different ones?
As last, what makes these meshing AP’s different from the other ones if they both mesh?
The Mesh APs come out of the box with Mesh enabled, they can even be adopted into an existing Unifi network without any ethernet connection to the network as they will connect to the existing wired Unifi APs (you do have to make sure the wired APs have the option set to allow other APs to connect to their wireless)
Other than that the Mesh APs are just a different form factor - in fact at this time the AP-M and AP-M-Pro are the only APs actually designed for outdoor use that are actively manufactured. Some people notice that the AP-M-Pro has a very large resemblance to the discontinued AP-AC-Outdoor…
I do find Unifi’s “Mesh” products to be a little disingenuous because they only have a single 5GHz radio that has to be shared between the uplink and the clients, which also means the downstream Mesh units have to use the same channel as their uplinked ones. Ubiquiti is not alone in this, but Mesh systems exist that have a second dedicated backhaul radio - I know Netgear Orbi and Zyxel have this.
I wonder if the touch screens would even work in -10 degrees circumstances. Usually they become unresponsive in freezing temperatures. You should contact zebra for such information.
I’m considering AC-PRO over AC-Mesh as the price isnt significant higher. @LTS_Tom any thoughts on this?
