I have a client that is looking to replace AP’s due to crazy licensing costs. Are Unifi AP’s capable and reliable enough for a school environment? This is a relatively small school with less than 1000 total students/staff. There would obviously be numerous AP’s. Due to the physical layout of the school, likely 100 or so AP’s. But I’m more or less wondering if Unifi hardware is considered to be capable of the demand within a school setting? Is it on par with Ruckus and the like? I don’t know where to place Unifi AP gear on the spectrum of quality. Thank you for any input you may have.
For what it is worth, we have a small private school. Only 100 students and staff. We invested in Unifi Access points/ switches 5 years ago and and have not looked back. We started with 2 of the gen 1 UAP AC LR 2.4ghz and then upgraded to 2 gen 2 UAP AC LR’s 3 years ago now. All still on 1- 8 port Poe switch. We run 5 subsets, and radius for all the school owned and teachers personal devices. Average 70 wireless clients load between the 2 AP’s. At the end of the day it just works. I have a spare switch and AP provisioned and sitting in a box collecting dust.
Cheers.
Thanks Tom, I appreciate your input very much. Thanks for everything you do with the YouTube channel.
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+1 on the Unifi is fine in schools. I used to look after quite a lot of schools and we used Unifi. It always trumped whatever we were replacing just remember to think about areas where you might have a class of 30 laptops all turn on at the same time and drop a couple of APs there.
I can only report from experience that UniFi APs and the controller management are excellent. When planning, it is important that EACH access point has a hop to an AP that is connected to a switch, so that you do not negatively affect the actual performance with a series connection.
Works very well in School. Due to the pandemic we did our 5th School with Unifi. All around ~60 Access Points. The oldest installation we in a school with 40 AP is this year 3 Years old. UAP-AC-PRO and a local running controller non cloud key based. No issues so far.
Price is just one Advantage over Huawei, Ruckus, Aruba. Even if a AP would be broken, for a price of one Ruckus you can get several AC-PRO. And you do not need High Density in Schools. We have in avg. 2.2 Classrooms on one AP; Thats about 60 to 80 Users at max. Most bottleneck I noticed in schools is the available internet line. Many schools here only have 200M for the Whole School, Some have a asymetrical 1000/60 which is not so much. I tell them they should first invest in a better internet Line before thinking of a 50k Wifi project.
I wrote a small post about the Whole School Wifi Topic some weeks ago because here it is really like pain in the ass. The whole gov. strctures are so retarded in case of bringing things to work. Everything is so slow and
Here is my “a bit angry” Write up:
https://quicknote.io/938aea60-84d4-11eb-bd4f-254348889ee0
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Been using the UAP-AC-HDs in classrooms for over a year. We also use UAP-AC-PROs. I like the HDs because I can turn down the 2.4GHz signal to 15dbm and keep the 5GHz signal at 20dbm.
Like others, my advice is to use another router than Ubiquiti’s. I use the Netgate SG-3100 running pfSense 2.4.5-RELEASE-p1. I had updated to their most recent release 21.02-p1(arm), but it was not ready for the ARM architecture, so I had to revert to 2.4.5_1. The Netgate support people helped me get back on track. Luckily, I had good backups of the configs.
Back to Ubiquiti, there have been some issues with firmware/software updates in the past few months. The recommendation is to use:
For CK Gen2 Plus controller: 6.0.45
For US POE switches: 4.3.20 or 4.3.21, don’t use higher until you see the forums give thumbs up
For UAP-AC-HD and PRO: 4.3.20 or 4.3.21
Anyway, the Ubiquiti gear is top notch and has been running well, while saving us a ton of money.
Greg