Ubiquity appears to have a good reputation, at least among my IT contacts. I was surprised to discover that their warranty sucks. A gazillion places sell Ubiquity products, but the Ubiquity warranty ONLY applies if you purchased their product directly from Ubiquity or from one of their “official” and quite short vendor list. I wish that I knew the fine print before making my recent purchases. I am happy with the working products. I am satisfied with the integrity of the online store from whom I purchased the problematic device. I am merely expressing my disappointment in the very narrow warranty offered. https://www.ui.com/support/warranty/
What exactly did Ubiquity tell you when you asked for warranty on this product(s)?
I’m not going to buy their switches anymore. I just started trying them out a couple years ago and after just 18 months 3 ports on an 8 port 150 watt quit serving PoE so it had to be replaced. Most switch manufacturers have lifetime warranties. They have cost effective wifi but their switches aren’t cheaper than others but have less warranty support.
They also honor warranty if “Sold by Amazon” (not sold by someone else on Amazon). Amazon mostly buys via Ingram Micro.
This type of warranty limited by whether you purchased the device from an approved source is common for business networking equipment. Cisco, Ruckus, etc do the same. Their logic is that the warranty is only valid for the “first buyer”, and if you bought it from an unauthorized source then that other person/company is actually the “first buyer”, so you should go to them with your issues.
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Lifetime warranty on switches, which brands are those just wandering. Have used Cisco and Dell Force xx in enterprise and they required either a maintenance agreement or they had 3yr support.
Aruba, Ruckus, Netgear (specific product lines meant for business), almost any other brand that targets business use cases that isn’t Ubiquiti or a cheap chinese brand.
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I think you’ll find ubiiquiti leaves much to be desired, especially in the customer service and support areas. Many people have jumped ship due to this. I suggest searching the ubnt forums.
The terrible support is often excused away with people saying things like, “That’s how they keep the product cheap”.
Yet, now that they offer/ed paid premium support, users are still ranting about not getting support or customer services while paying. And the main complaint is either never getting called back or being told to use the forums, just like any other user.
The bottom line with Ubiquiti is they have beautifully designed equipment (CEO is an ex APPLE employee) at often decent prices (though as of late that is disputed…), but often lacking on the firmware side with anything more than basic functioning of said product and near-zero customer service.
I have a stack wsith a 1x USG P4, 2x USW24 Switches, and 3x UAP-AC-LR’s. I am in the process of ditching it all for another vendor(s). Currently researching. Likely go custom PFSense or OPNSense box, dell switch… still looking at AP’s.
Originally had 3x UAP-Pros bricked by a firmware update. UBNT Did replace them with the current UAP-AC-LR’s for free acknowledging their firmware was the issue. Of coruse only if you made aa stink about it.
So far, a switch slowly died, initially, the activity lights died on the first set of ports, eventually completely dying. Out of the 1-year return/RMA. Everything else is on garbage firmware lacking feature requests going back years and year. Using old versions of things such as strongswan.
I’ve had a serious issue since nearly the beginning. Randomly the network would go down. Upon reconnecting the wifi devices would get 1 of 2 errors. Authentication error or DHCP error. It affected wifi mostly and only partially wired. I made several threads and even a few direct messages. Never acknowledged or answer. The thread responses were things like “happening to me too!”
This issue can also be triggered by changing the DNS in the USG. The USG continues to revert back to my ISP dns and not the DNS I input.
Issues I’ve asked about such as when setting DHCP SCOPE, the range starts at .6 instead of ,2. I.E 192.168.1.0/24 scope should give you 192.168.1.2-254 NOT 192.168.1.6-254. 0 Route, 1 gateway, 255 broadcast. I’m not crazy.
Just constant little issues easily fixed but always ignored.
These are issues that have dragged on since at least late 2015 early 2016. Being kept despite firmware advancements.
And when you need help, constantly referred to the forums, where no employee ever chimes in UNLESS it will help THEM not YOU. Otherwise you have to hope someone else had the problem and it was solved, or users step in kindly and help troubleshoot.
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They asked me to do some troubleshooting steps. I am currently complying.
Good information. I have upgraded switches and APs before, but never had any failures of a new unit. I am learning.
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Aruba on some models warranty is 5 years for original purchaser. But check as this varies with models.
We have 15yr old ProCurve switches still being replaced by HP.
I think you need to weigh this up, it is a gamble I guess. Pay for Unifi and be lucky most probably are because so many people are buying them. Cheap enough to budget having a spare or 2 sitting on the shelf depending on the size of the project.
Personally I prefer Aruba, have tried a US-8-150 switch at home but sold it in favour of a Aruba 2530 PoE+ 8 port. Plus the fact I prefer having a console port for out of band config. Price difference was not much at the time.
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HP bought out Aruba networks. Aruba’s switches are decent looking but haven’t decided on one yet.
Their access points seem nice too but i’m not sure how they behave in a managed network landscape or what’s involved in deploying them. I’ve mentioned them in this forum before and nobody responded, so i’m assuming nobody knew anything about them.
@d-someone-said Aruba’s 2530 8 port prices range from 265 to 550 USD.
@onthegrind This switch seems like it could be good. https://www.serversupply.com/NETWORKING/SWITCH/24%20PORT/HPE/J9983A_234832.htm
i have not had any failures with their access points, but I do not own their switches so far.
UbiquitI with an “i” on the end. Not a “y”.
We’ve been a BIG Ubiquiti house since way before the brand became popular. I’m talking back when the Unifi APs were square…and Edge and Air products were their main stream, and Unifi switches 'n gateways were barely in their infancy. Took a bit to get Unifi matured for switches 'n gateways…so in the early days we stuck with Edge products for that, with Unifi APs. However once they hired one of the PFSense founders, Chris Buechler, to take over the Unifi product…it matured a lot and we switched to it.
We’ve been doing IT for SMBs for nearly 30 years. In the old days we were Cisco Catalyst…and HP ProCurve. We’ve also done Cisco wireless, and Aruba wireless, Meraki wireless, and HP Procurve wireless…so we’ve had experience with enterprise grade iron. So we’re used to top notch products and lifetime warranty. However, we have not had problems with Ubiquitis RMA process. And I tell ya…we move a LOT of Ubiquiti products each week! We partnered with a large ISP and we provide preconfigured gateways/switches for the ISPs clients that they’re onboarding with their VoIP product…since they don’t want to manage the network side. Every week we get a lot of Ubiquiti hardware moving through our office.
As an MSP…we also keep “stock on the shelf”…since, if a client has something blow up, we need to replace it ASAP. It’s part of our responsibility and service. UI hardware is low in cost enough where you can keep spares on your shelf. Matter of fact, it’s low in cost enough were…for clients that really need higher uptime, when quoting a network project…I factor in a spare or two of items…so they have a “hot spare” onsite. Same as I do with firewalls (linux based)…for clients that need uptime. Or when I’m doing point to point wireless shots…I always include a spare in the quote.
Another thing most people don’t learn about…Ubiquiti has a program called ELITE…where you can enroll your clients devices into this. A program with stable controller versions, and an accelerated RMA process. Yes it costs money…but people don’t whine about Meraki or Ruckus or whatever…that has monthly costs? This is still cheaper!
As for support…Ubiquiti makes basically simple products. Except for Amplifi, Ubiquiti makes products designed for businesses. Therefore…designed to be installed by people that have some knowledge about network equipment. How many of you have called STinksys or Nutgear or DStink…for support of their products? I don’t see a lot of hands raised here!!! Ubiquiti posts lots of hand holding guides on their products, and they have “certification” material updated and published all the time, and even support a training program you can go to…a 2x day class thing. I’ve been to one…since we like Ubiquiti products, and it’s great. But you can still download the course material if you don’t want to attend a training class.
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I think there are a couple camps here. There are shops that use Ubiquiti for many of their clients and then there are corporate/single site kind of set ups.
Those of us with many installs that we manage typically have our own controller in the cloud and have spare parts on the shelf. For us having central management where we can control firmware updates and all that is key. We also use the products enough that we learn the idiosyncrasies of Unifi products and don’t have to contact support.
For the single site guys, Ubiquiti might not be the right fit. If you only configure a firewall once every three years when you replace it, learning the Unifi tricks might not make sense.
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We have an Aruba managed system about 2000+ APs and 700+ switches. We are happy with them. The whole package is more incentive with ClearPass as having a decent NAC solution is high on the list. Works seemless as a whole package and we are quite happy with it. The only down times we’ve had have in the years that I have been there have been due to user config error or other systems failing and a knock on effect.
@d-someone-said This would be off-topic but maybe you could create a separate topic if you were willing or DM me, I got some questions about how their architecture works. There seem to be a lot of components in their managed system confuses me.
I’m not 100% to be honest I can say we have a cluster of Appliances. The APs talk to the controllers in a tunnel I think but we only need to untagga single vlan for APs and not each vlan for each SSID. You can create pools of vlans though which is great. Also Remote APs which can act as a sort of VPN in a box where you can provision additional eth ports on specific vlans etc. as well as SSIDs lie if the user was on site.
But yes back to topic 
Well my question is more about the basic deployment end of things, like software & hardware dependancies - licensing requirements etc. The managed side of the AP mesh seems to require a controller to handle various behind the scenes things, without having it in my hands i can only guess how it all goes together.
Can you just run the AP’s in a mesh without having to get these pricey extra’s i’ve seen? Or will they not work without them?
I think some can be Instant APs which we’ve had to change to APs to be managed. But I don’t yhink my knowledge can give you much more info. Sorry.
Maybe looking at AirHeads will be more helpfull for you.
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Another thing most people don’t learn about…Ubiquiti has a program called ELITE…where you can enroll your clients devices into this. A program with stable controller versions, and an accelerated RMA process. Yes it costs money…but people don’t whine about Meraki or Ruckus or whatever…that has monthly costs? This is still cheaper!
I guess you haven’t seen/heard - Elite is discontinued, the phone number doesn’t go anywhere, and support for people who have remaining contract time is handled by the regular Tier 2 support.
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