Product Launch
anonymous
1 points
160 comments
Posted29 days agoActive23 days ago
UniFi 5G
blog.ui.comlaunchedhardwareconsumers
Key Features
5G connectivityUniFi network integrationhigh-speed internet
Tech Stack
5G
Key Features
Tech Stack
> For tougher environments or deployments with poor indoor cellular coverage, the outdoor model maintains the same high performance cellular connectivity with improved antenna performance in a durable IP67 rated enclosure. It is built for rooftop installs, off site locations, and mobile deployments where reliability is critical. Just like its indoor counterpart, you can also connect it via any PoE port, anywhere on your network, greatly simplifying cabling requirements.
And the first image they show of the outdoor model is it installed in a fixed location on a rooftop.
>Built for rooftops, remote sites, and vehicle based setups
They are insinuating if you actually read their press release then you would not state it was targeted only at stationary deployments.
Based on the spec sheet 2 out of its 6 antennas are directional, this is probably a 4x4 modem so it must have some way to switch 2 antenna from directional to omni.
(6) Embedded cellular antennas, including (2) high-gain for downlink: peak 9 dBi, 85°x85°
Typically these modems are 4x4 mimo so it must have some method for switching the 2 directional with 2 of the omnis in it based on which ones is needed.
I’m honestly tempted to get it for my house. My ISP downtime is pretty low but it does happen every once in a while, at the most inopportune times, which impedes working from home.
Having a wireless backup would hopefully cover those downtimes
I have a network cable from my secondary WAN port on my dream machine running to my first story roof where there’s a wall mount ready for starlink to be plopped in.
I wish there were cheaper 10gb switch from Ubiquiti. The link Agg is good, but still pricey.
I discovered the same thing the hard way myself recently (in Norway); turns out that cell towers only has enough battery for ~24-36 hours (if you're lucky).
However, someone messing with the fibre to my house is a bigger possibility than power outage, so I'll probably end up with this 5G product. :)
Interesting option.
I am cautiously optimistic that this means even if thousands of these devices suddenly "light up" in an outage, the infrastructure should be able to handle them, right? Thoughts?
The problem with this setup for me is that it doesn't work with uplink that sometimes becomes unstable yet nominally working, and in general LTE fallback triggers slowly.
Are there any prosumer-friendly options for connection bundling, which can balance uplinks continuously?
They support load balancing (e.g. 95% WAN1, 5% WAN2) and SLA monitoring (ping/packet loss/jitter) with some voting options on what triggers a swap.
I think pfsense has similar options for WAN balancing if you don't like UI for routing.
At the same time I would never recommend anyone get 5G internet as their primary service if you have other options and especially not from one of these cheap providers.
[1] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/
[2] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/vyos-router-update/#wan-f...
How are you handling updates? Do you update on a fixed cadence, or do you build your own LTS? Or do you just take a random nightly and stick to it?
Interesting fact that EdgeOS from Unifi was a fork.
That's how I got started with it, my first "proper" router was an ER-X. It's sad they abandoned the Edge product line to move everything to the UI first Unifi one that still doesn't have all the features (specifically, conditional routing for address groups/ipsets).
Initially I thought this is going to be a huge pain. I have many interfaces and also pass-through hardware like the SFP28 card. I made a copy of my primary router vm and added fake interfaces with the same MAC addresses. I then went through the update procedure which was very simple.
in vyos vm:
wget https://community-downloads.vyos.dev/stream/1.5-stream-2025-Q2/vyos-1.5-stream-2025-Q2-generic-amd64.iso -o vyos-1.5-stream-2025-Q2.iso
add system image /mnt/iso/vyos-1.5-stream-2025-Q2.iso
# follow prompts
reboot
# boot screen will offer two version now, old and new
You do loose any custom configs you may have. In my case it was fstab changes and my cron entries.
I adore VyOS
I have a T-Mobile backup home internet plan, and when I had a rack set up, it was my failover from fiber. The Dream Machine Pro did auto failover and failback flawlessly. However, I recently moved, and am redoing my homelab so I have no rack right now; internet is from a Dream Router, so I don’t have auto-failover. I doubt I’d buy this for the small window of time I expect to be in this situation, but if you didn’t have or want a rack, an AIO with failover would be great.
https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052548713-WAN-Failo...
The 5G unit itself also has its own failover with support for two 5G SIMs.
"All are equipped with dual SIM slots, with one SIM replaceable by eSIM, and are fully unlocked: any major carrier, any type of deployment, with one piece of hardware."
(I've been using Mikrotik LHG LTE6 kit devices for years now)
In locations where you're at the edge of coverage, and your phone is not getting anything at all, it's great.
I sometimes suspected that the modem in these LTE / 5G routers is less well tuned and tested with various network than what you have e.g. in an iPhone.
The Mikrotik LTE6 device is a Cat.6 LTE device, so up to 300/50Mbits, and since some time ago, all iPhones are Cat.20 and 5G and all that stuff.
But that's not the only important thing. The frequency band support for the modem is very important. Not all networks nor even cell phone antennas work on the same frequencies, so even when connecting to antennas of the same company, depending on the antenna you connect, it'll have different bands enabled depending on the hardware or the connectivity they have there.
You have to check the specs for you modem [0][1] and see what bands are supported, what bands are supported in the antenna your connecting to [2]... Depending on the category of your device [3], and the channels that are allowed to be used at the same time, the congestion, the interference, and... it can happen than a consumer phone downloads faster than a dedicated industrial modem, if the available frequencies aren't the most favorable.
--
0: https://mikrotik.com/product/lhg_lte6_kit#product_specification
1: https://www.apple.com/iphone/cellular/
2: https://www.cellmapper.net
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-UTRA#User_Equipment_(UE)_categoriesIs there a Mikrotik 5G version though? I am still waiting for that.
Actually, it seems one of the advantages of the new Ubiquiti devices over Teltonika/Mikrotik/Gl.iNet is that they actually have 10 Gbps SFP+ and 2.5 Gbps ethernet ports.
Edit: The SIMPoYo eSIM Physical Card (see https://www.gl-inet.com/campaign/simpoyo-cards/ ) seems really cool, may even be nice for a phone.
Seems an odd omission for a ruggedised outside modem - the Unifi also seems to not support external antennae.
(I'd also prefer a unifi version just so it fits in the with rest of the networking infra I have in the mökki.)
If you mean the standard routers (like the Rutx50), Teltonika itself sells external enclosures with antennas. https://www.teltonika-networks.com/products/accessories/ante...
Seems weird to cripple the product by not allowing me to (optionally) disable the internal antenna and instead use and tune an external antenna. And I suspect that is likely to make a difference when you are on the edge of coverage, but you know exactly where the relevant cell tower is, a few km away.
That said, I have some concerns that the OpenWRT AP firmware is not as optimized as the Unifi firmware is for that specific hardware. Mostly for wireless performance, but I also don’t want to hit some weird CPU bottleneck.
Have you looked at Mikrotik? They offer a more traditional autonomous OS w/o controllers and both a nice CLI and a powerful GUI tool.
It's alright except for some shenanigans with DHCP trying to compete with the router, I fixed that by just disabling DHCP on the AP if I recall correctly.
Speeds are pretty much as advertised on the box, the main thing using wireless is the TV as it has a 100mbit LAN port and it it's always smooth sailing. VLAN-separated SSIDs work great as well.
Did you know there is an entire post category for ads and self-promotion? https://news.ycombinator.com/show
> 2.5 Gbit/s PoE to upstream switch
Can anybody explain to me why these supposedly premier networking devices are lacking so much in bandwidth? I get it that mmWave is really only ever realistically going to hit 2.5G over the air, but is there any reason why they're not willing to provide at least 10G copper, or an actual SFP port? Hell, even Macs support 10G these days. I never understood this. Do they mean 2 Gbps downlink per client, or per device in total? If it's the former, 2.5G wired seems like a major bottleneck to any serious consumption.
If a single client at 2 Gbps is all the promise of 5G amounted to, well, it would be disappointing to say the least.
Portability and heat. You can get a small USB 2.5G adapter that produces negligible heat, but a Thunderbolt 10G adapter is large and produces a substantial amount of heat.
I use 10G at home, but the adapter I throw into my laptop bag is a tiny 2.5G adapter.
I knew it runs hot before I deployed it, but I wasn't aware that you have to wait for it to cooldown before unplugging, or you get burnt.
There's of course fiber too...
For 5Gbps and higher, you'll need another PCIE line - and SOHO motherboards are usually already pretty tight on PCIE lanes.
10GbE will require 4x3.0 lanes
3.0 PCIE is irrelevant today when it comes to devices you want on 10G. I'm pretty sure the real reason is that 2.5G can comfortably run on cable you used for 1G[1], while 10G get silly hot or requires transceiver and user understanding of a hundred 2-3 letter acronyms.
Combine it with IPS speeds lagging behind. 2.5G while feels odd to some, makes total sense on consumer market.
[1]: at short distances, I had replaced one run with shielded cable to get 2.5G, but it had POE, so it might contribute to noise?)
10Gb interfaces also tend to run quite hot and be a bit power hungry.
This is a device that needs to be in a location with good 5G reception, so it makes sense to be PoE powered so you can put it near a window or in the location that gets the best reception, and only run a long ethernet cable. And, although I don't like it too much, 2.5G or 5G NBASE-T is the nearest thing that covers 5G speeds.
The 2Gb downlink speed is the 5G downlink, the max for the whole 5G connection, so 2.5Gb ethernet is enough for that.
The better reason to put a 10G transceiver in this would be that some (cheap, honestly garbage) SFP+ transceivers can’t negotiate anything between 1G and 10G. But I’ve only seen that on bargain-bin hardware so I don’t know that they should be designing products around it.
OpenBSD 7.7 (GENERIC) #339: Sun Apr 13 17:52:27 MDT 2025
deraadt@octeon.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/octeon/compile/GENERIC
real mem = 536870912 (512MB)
avail mem = 521142272 (497MB)
I just checked and my new Wifi 7 APs don't run Debian though, they...
admin@BedroomAP:~# cat /etc/os-release
NAME="OpenWrt"
VERSION="23.05-SNAPSHOT"
ID="openwrt"
ID_LIKE="lede openwrt"
PRETTY_NAME="OpenWrt 23.05-SNAPSHOT"
VERSION_ID="23.05-snapshot"
....Their wired stuff is a total scam since Edgerouter fell off, though. The same functionality exists on a $50 netgear managed switch (or wired router, etc.), and the shitty unified configuration interface doesn’t justify the markup at all.
Meanwhile, the quality of their competitors’ tools for managing multiple switches without manually configuring each one, individually, over SSH or via a graphical tool is not necessarily amazing.
For example, it’s been a while since I used Ruckus Unleashed (the low-end management tool from an very upmarket vendor), but I think UniFi Network (the management tool) is a good amount better than Unleashed.
I really wish the people who put so much effort into software like OpenWRT would put some of that effort into managing multiple devices in a nice, unified manner. The tooling could be so much better.
There is OpenWISP: Leveraging Linux OpenWrt, OpenWISP is an open-source solution for efficient IT network deployment, monitoring & management.
Au contraire!
I got tired of the refrain "are you messing with the network again?" in the evenings when the neighbors are all streaming Netflix and crowding the airwaves, so I installed several low power UI APs around the house and and popped my own DNS and devices to a separate VLAN.
No more complaints :)
I do wish Unifi offered more configuration in the ad-blocking department, but I'm hesitant to inflict anything but the most vanilla deployment on the remainder of the household..
Ubiquiti 5 port managed switch: $30 https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-switching/products/u...
Netgear 24 port managed switch: $260 (with a 1 year subscription included!) https://www.netgear.com/business/wired/switches/smart-cloud/...
Ubiquiti 24 port managed switch: $225 https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-switching/products/u...
Sorry, but what markup are you referring to?
I'm sure you can find price differences at different products & tiers, but quickly glancing around it sure doesn't look like Ubiquiti has any particular premium markup.
Regardless having a self-hosted, buy-it-and-own-it, non-business friendly product line absolutely has value. I loved my mikrotik switches when I was just messing around, but the single pane of glass, central management is not insignificant when time becomes a more precious resource and you just need it to work.
Which is how I'm using mine actually, one less wall wart in the area I use them
I do wish they were even smaller (I've got one location I'd like to mount one inside a wall box, which is admittedly pretty niche), and I am never again touching UI's configuration software (even 10 years later I feel that wound), but, yeah... love these little guys.
Sure some of their hardware is overpriced, but they're pushing the limits of what's available in the 10 and 25 Gbe areas at relatively reasonable prices.
Why did AVM or Netgear Orbi not get this treatment for "works", though?
Unifi is used by the tech-savvy homeowner that needs PoE for their security cameras and wants to control and configure their network without needing a network engineer.
1. Eero - great performance, no web config (only mobile app), cloud dependent, half the features paywalled for monthly subscription (eyeroll)
2. Linksys - confirmed piles of crap, a 6E mesh kit I tried last year performed worse than my 2018 Eeros so why bother. Config is even more limiting than Eero, the web UI is a slow disaster that times out constantly, and the app is terrible and the features are badly designed.
3. Netgear - sucks as parent comment explains
4. TP-Link - reputation is that it's bad but I haven't tried
5. Asus - never tried
6. Google - no doubt they'll kill and brick these at some point
Any others I'm forgetting?
There is now also TP-Link's Omada line at least which seems like the most comparable alternative.
Unifi is great for small IT companies providing network services to tens of costumers. Being able to manage everything remotely (and even batch things for all of your customers) is great.
I've done this using an android phone, usb-c hub w/ethernet nic, and and edgerouter lite before.
The biggest missing piece i see is the option for an external antenna.
They have tried to go subscription based licensing but that can be conflicting for companies who just want decent reliable network gear in all the above market segments.
I fit in the prosumer category and have about $10,000 in gear and while it's great for my needs I don't see myself ever spending money for network gear subscriptions.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/comments/1bfe7n9/u7pro_ver...
Aside from noise it's also not ideal for longevity in dusty environments, since the case is sealed tight there won't be much you can do if it gets gunked up.
Ubiquiti is one of the few companies doing prosumer hardware - and doing it extremely well. They give you access to advanced, raw configurations without necessarily having to go "full enterprise" deployment. They also have solutions for just about everything.
That being said, I generally have moved towards other Wifi solutions as I've grown weary of tweaking Ubiquiti all of the time. I found that I could get better top-end performance out of Ubiquiti gear, but really struggled to hammer out poor performance in edge cases. Particularly, with jitter and random latency spikes.
My consumer mesh wifi system gets nowhere near it's advertised performance, with little way for me to tweak it. However, I rarely need "full performance" and it doesn't suffer from the same random glitches.
But I might pick up an R720 just to play with -- that's a different echelon of gear.
Thanks for the tip.
802.11ax ("wifi 6") is as good as it gets, with [eg] their wAP AX.
They get a lot of stuff right, though. They run RouterOS, which is a custom userland for Linux that is intensely flexible. Approximately any routing-esque function a person can dream up that can work with a Linux kernel can be made to work within RouterOS.
The form factor of the wAP AC/AX boxes is really very nice -- they can blend well in on a wall (inside or outside), attached to a pipe, or whatever. I've got a wAP AC on the wall of my living room, for instance. I use another one when "camping" off-grid, zip-tied to the leg of an easy-up awning.
It's ostensibly just an access point, but it doesn't have to be. I mean, like: There's two ethernet ports, but they exist without a preconceived function. Want to use it as a router, with hardware WAN and LAN ports? How about with VLANs and a managed switch instead, so it works with just one cable? Eleventy-five different SSIDs? Bridging networks with wifi? Using station mode to leech bandwidth from the cafe across the street, and perform firewalling and NAT and VPN, so you can use it in your apartment -- with only one box? Sure, no problem. Whatever it is, it works.
Power is flexible. All of the bits to use passive POE are included; or it can just plug in with the included DC connector; or it can use proper 802.3af PoE.
I don't know how it compares to something from Ruckus, but I'm much more pleased with it than the Ubiquity gear that I am presently taking a break from fighting with.
Wire still wins - especially for backhauls between endpoint. However, it’s really nice being able to stick an AP anywhere you have an outlet to extend the range. I have a few outdoor devices (speakers, lights, TV) that daisy chain though APs while getting just good enough performance for what I need.
Teltonika also has started to create a similar solution but it is not in the same level just yet.
This is unprecedented and much appreciated.
I now exclusively use open-source projects with a strong history and community - or used high-end enterprise gear that I pick up when it reaches EOL so it's dirt cheap. Stability has been so much better, even with the most advanced configs I ever created.
Another example, I had Frigate set up on a home rolled NAS. Again, it worked alright, but it always stole time from me. It always needed a little maintenance or tweaking or thinking. I bought a UNVR and modern Unifi cameras. Adopted, zero thinking or management from me. I still retain control of my data and it respects my privacy. It isn't perfect, but at the price point it solved meaningful problems I cared about in both cases. Yes they are commercial products and not open source, but they are priced reasonably to my eyes (the UCG ultra was actually cheaper than the netgate). That makes me a happy customer.
I have run their wifi APs for over a decade with no problems. It's not perfect, I know there are still privacy concerns. No company is really perfect, but they are good to me.
Meanwhile, Apple still hasn't fixed bugs that I reported to them between 2012 and 2014 while working for one of the largest universities in North America as a level 2 tech.
I'm looking forward to getting more Unifi gear in the near future.
Honestly they are nothing like Apple - like just look at their mobile apps - how many do they have - 10 ? To interact with the same gateway just for slightly different use-cases. Not to mention that the functionalities are hard to decipher
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