I know what you are thinking, as soon as I mention UniFi you are going to puff and think to yourself these guys are WiFi amateurs.
Well maybe you aren’t thinking that, but a few years ago, I definitely would have been if I was competing on a bid for a campus wide WiFi network and going against Ubiquiti.
I would have thought they weren’t Cisco resellers – we are Cisco resellers by the way.
Or maybe they never used Meraki – we do often and we love it for K12.
Or they just didn’t know any better – well we thought we did until based on budget constraints it was the best option for Ames Plantation.
We got a lead from this very website asking about possible options for distributing a single fiber Internet connecting all the buildings at the Ames Plantation located in rural Grand Junction, Tennessee. Its about an hour drive from Memphis.
Not having reliable high bandwidth Internet is ubiquitous with rural locations – pun intended. After consulting with the customer and seeing his layout I asked why not use StarLink or multiple fibers at each location?
The customer understanding his facility and the ROI told me exactly what he wanted to use: a single internet connection connecting the other buildings with wireless bridges. He might have even mentioned UniFi, but if he didn’t, everyone in WiFi networking knows UniFi does a great job with their point 2 point bridges. I’ve seen countless Cisco installations with a Ubiquiti AirFiber somewhere in the mix. It works well, gets the bandwidth, and the interface is intuitive.
Now we know a a real world solution for connecting the buildings, but how is the customer going to get 1Gb of bandwidth to all the buildings and still be within budget?
I’ll tell you how, this perfectly shaped sphere of affordable network infrastructure perfection. Okay perfection is redundant there, but this device was a perfect solution for the Ames Plantation’s connectivity.
The affordable, the reliable, the Wave Pico.
Lets be honest, UniFi is cheap in a good way, but with all cheap good things there are compromises.
Don’t think for a single second you are going to get some kind of support from them if you have a weird issue. You aren’t paying for support or licenses or anything other than 1Gbps over a 60Ghz frequency which is awesome. If support is needed start googling, redditing, or duckduckgo’ing if those are the correct verbs. UniFi does offer paid professional support, but luckily, we haven’t needed to use it.
Another awesome thing you get with the Pico is that it’s a completely free cloud based portal management of your devices in the UISP console. Think of the CloudKey but actually in the cloud and free. I’m not sure if they will keep offering this at no cost, but it lists all your devices like other WiFi cloud controllers and allows you to mange firmware, configurations, connectivity, etc. The UISP console also sends out alerts if the devices fails over to the backup 5Ghz radio or has an issue. Hope, its not a weird one though.
The Pico devices are beyond easy to deploy and configure. Simply use the UISP mobile app and Bluetooth. Yes, you can also use the same app to see all your production devices and get push notification for alerts.
Okay now we got all the buildings connected do we try to switch gears and sell the customer Meraki, Aruba, or Ruckus for inside the building WiFi? All great products, but isn’t this what UniFi is great at, highly affordable close to enterprise solutions? Should we stop UniFi at the door, and ask another vendor to step right in?
Heck no, they got us to the building lets let them come inside, and they are already the perfect fit with the customer’s budget.
We were able to offer the UniFi U7 Pro to future proof the installation with radios for the customer’s 2.4Ghz IoT devices, 5Ghz for WiFi 5 and 6, and 6Ghz for WiFi6E and WiFi7. Ames Plantation is going to be able to use every bit of that 1Gbps Fiber uplink and will be ready to utilize more if there is an upgrade in the future. The U7 Pros are being power via PoE from UniFi Ultra Switches
I mentioned before how the Wave Pico made all this possible, but now let me briefly mention the cherry on top:
The Cloud Gateway Ultra – Cloud Key and Firewall
Talk about going just too far on value and performance, this little baby is awesome. I’m not saying its going to handle your data center, but for 100 – 300 clients its perfect. It freaking has redundant WAN ports for Internet load balancing and fail over. It also has a feature called Teleport for the easiest VPN access ever and built in free SDWan support. When I need to access those Picos for any reason, I open the Teleport app on my Mac, and I’m connected to their private subnets within seconds. Talk about cool.
Typically UniFi requires an additional device called a cloud key to manages all the devices, but its actually built in the The Cloud Gateway Ultra. Very similar to how Meraki works. The UniFi website says it can handle up to 300 devices such as APs, Switches, etc.
Having every client, Access Point, and Switch in one pane of glass with the Cloudkey’s web portal without hardware and software licenses is why UniFi is a great product and absolutely perfect for budget conscious customers.
Well, I said a lot, hopefully you get the point, UniFi has a great product line and enterprise like features for 5% of the cost of other vendors. Wait did I just say 5% of the price of a Meraki installation? Yes, you add up the hardware costs, and then licensing you are going to pay about 95% more.
Would I suggest UniFi if someone has the budget for Cisco? No, but it definitely has a role in WiFi, and can make a huge difference for your deployment.
If you want to know more about UniFi send me an email sales@modernservicesinc.com, but we typically don’t even sell it. We send customers to ui.com, they have a warehouse in Memphis and the shipping is typically within 2 days.
