We exculisvly use UniFi WiFI products in the enterprise. We have more than 900s APs deployed. There are some drawbacks usually about the number of active assosications, total throuput etc.. for the UniFi system.
Are there anyone who have compared both in terms of reliability, performance, TX/RX levels, and # of clients connected ?
Hi, Can we get UniW-Fi model number for the comparision purpose?
We have mainly UniFi-LR and Outdoor+ units.
A few UniFI-AC-LR s as well but mainly gen1 LRs.
Most of the time the main problem is the # of clients connected and poor RX levels at the AP side.
I only tested a couple of ubnt, but cambium is better in every way.
What I have learned in the past years is that ubnt works for small deployments, starting wisp, but at some point when they grow, all have to migrate to a better platform.
Hi, no comparision results today and will make a note of your request!
We put put UniFi up in three environments. Hotel, casino and RV park. Same as everything else Ubiquiti. RTM means Rush to Market. Far and away the number one issue is hardware failure. The overall scheme is disjointed and the controller is as well. I've enjoyed talking with their dev team and, just like the Vyatta pair, they have zero understanding of what opperators actually need. Nor do they seem to care. Kudos on the EP-R8 though. Nice piece of hardware although the MTU is capped at 9000, at least on the f/w release I was working with. Hopefully we can get Mtik RouterOS to run on it.
Cambium is still in development, but more capable at this stage than UniFi will ever be. Typical of Cambium, configuration is rediculous. But then, that is the tradeoff for granular management without paying for Meraki.
If you're not a network operator and want dead simple that blows UniFi into the weeds, Open-Mesh CloudTrax. cnPilot is a quantum leap from there and right over UniFi. You can use the RF Elements bracket to put the ePMP1000 Hotspot radio on Ubiquiti antennas but you don't get the content filters like E400-500 as the hardware lacks processing power to support it.
Conclusion - No comparison between UniFi and cnPilot. Cambium offers cloud management and far more granularity at essentially the same price point for superior hardware and firmware. Power supplies are a lot better too. Maybe that is partly responsible fo the Unibiquiti failure rate.
I have to disagree here. I haven't used the Cambium cnPilot stuff yet but CloudTrax just doesn't work better than UniFi. In fact we entirely replaced a setup for a client that was using 15 APs of CloudTrax with an 8 AP UniFi system with huge performance gains and much better handling of clients. We've seen high loads of 100 mobile clients attached to a single UniFi AP with no problems. Of course bandwidth is shared over those 100 mobile clients, but they all connect and get to their social media just fine during the large events at this customer site. It makes a huge difference what gear you run though as well. With CloudTrax, at least when we used it, it was using traditional WDS for the "mesh" which means the further you get from the main device the less bandwidth you have available. WDS halves the bandwidth for every hop. With UniFi, it does the same thing if you are in "Wireless uplink" for an AP, but if you're wired then it's full bandwidth. We deployed UAP-AC-Pro units for indoor and UAP-AC-Outdoor for the outdoor locations. It has been phenominal equipment. The LR gear is not intended for dense deployments. In fact the LR by nature is designed to cover a wide area but it does so with antenna pattern changes to be more flat but less dense and changes the ACK time on wireless frames. You should never deploy LR or any other "long range" APs in a dense environment regardless of manufacturer.
Didn't saw the same thing at all with Unifi.
From our test, over 30 registration, the radio die. We add better result with Tik but not awsome. For event with hundred of customer we now use Ruckus.
I will give a shot at cnMeastro once we will be able to install it on our own server.
No one ever made a mistake going with Xirrus. Ruckus is all that as well. I've forgotten the name of the beamforming AP from Israel. Stellar performance at $5,500. No longer imported. It is important to reference Zebra as their heritage is related to Cambium although the products are quite different and much more expensive.
To reinforce AK's comments about the LR sieries, an IT management company specified 3 LR in a rectangular restaurant space of 2000 sq. ft. Installed in July. Yesterday, the restaurant manager called from their VoIP phone system to tell me the Internet was down. A little interogation and he conceded the Internet was fine, the WiFi was down. One 400A would do better in this scenario than 1, 2 or 3 UniFi LR with cnMaestro on EC2 the cherry on top.
My recommendation of CloudTrax was for people who need simple. CloudTrax is SISO, so range and capacity are limited by comparison but configuration is such that anyone can do it. People who can't get through a log on with UniFi will be done in minutes. Same as with Ubiquiti, a motel called over the weekend and the CloudTrax system needed a restart.
For the money, the cnPilot and ePMP series blows out the top off the price / performance curve and will likely be there for a long time. It's only downfall is GUI interpretation. Impossibly cryptic associations are made so you need three pages of definitions for two pages of configuration. If you go back to the original Canopy PtMP systems when NAT was introduced. You had to enable NAT>Save. Go to another page and set your addresses, another page for DNS and DHCP etc. This is better, so a few more revisions and the product will be mature enough to sell as the default solution. MikroTik's quickstart page is almost to the point where any installer can input a few items on a single page and you have a genuinely complete and robust solution with remote access and happy customers. Better late than never, right?
To the title of the thread - E400 and E500, cnMaestro crushes UniFi. I will add Ubiquiti's active Prism RF filter of the + series is very good, but we've experienced 100% failure rate with these.
Great input everyone. We know we still have some ways to go in making the configuration and management better. But new features are coming on board literally every couple of months. In the pipeline are documentation and user guide improvements, and getting a simple GUI for configuration going. We hope to roll out those changes soon.
Just wanted to share that we have started to swap our Unifi equipment with Cambium.
Mostly UAP-Pro, UAP-AC-Pro and Outdoor+ with E400, E500, and ePMP 1000. So long we have had a perfect start with no trouble at all, and overall better stability and throughput's.
If i'm to mention something that is negative, we have a little poorer coverage with E400 vs. UAP-Pro and UAP-AC-Pro, but the quality feel and experience covers up for that.
As i read, the management for cnMaestro is to be better, and thank god for that! It is not that intuitive, but it does the job for now.