Ubiquiti revamps its enterprise UniFi gear, and we’ve got some to review

In early July, Ars ran a syndicated piece from The Wirecutter on the best consumer-grade Wi-Fi extender. Ars readers as usual were quick on the comment button, and a number of folks left feedback on the article saying that even the best consumer-grade Wi-Fi extender is barely functional trash, and that if you really need to expand beyond a single access point, the way to do it is with enterprise-grade gear. Cisco gear came up a couple of times, but more than anything else Ars commenters kept bringing up Ubiquiti Networks and its UniFi line of wireless access points.

Being a site that likes technology, we reached out to Ubiquiti to see if they might be willing to loan us some UniFi gear to formally review, and as it turns out, our timing was fortuitous. Ubiquiti has just announced a re-vamp of the UniFi wireless access point product line, with new models all featuring 802.11ac as standard. Three of the four new models are priced extremely competitively even when considered for home use (the fourth model is for educational institutions only):

	UAP-AC-LITE	UAP-AC-LR	UAP-AC-PRO	UAP-AC-EDU
Radio	802.11ac/n/b/g/a	802.11ac/n/b/g/a	802.11ac/n/b/g/a	802.11ac/n/b/g/a
2.4GHz MIMO	2x2	3x3	3x3	3x3
5GHz MIMO	2x2	2x2	3x3	3x3
Power over Ethernet	24V passive	24V passive	802.3af / 802.3at	802.3at
MSRP	$89	$109	$149	$399

What does this kind of gear do that consumer-grade Wi-Fi extenders don’t? We’ve got review samples of the new hardware in hand right now, and it’s a pretty earth-shaking upgrade. The dead-easy configuration and extremely granular customization options are hella neat; the level of control over your WLAN and the clients on it is even better. This is the exact same system often used by small businesses or hotels when building out a large WLAN, and it even lets you customize a guest portal and generate vouchers to hand out to your friends for access (or force them to pay you $8 for using your Wi-Fi for a few hours), and it turns out that it makes a hell of a home system as well.

One thing it's not, though, is a firewall or NAT router—so, you'll have to bring your own router if you want to switch to a solution like this. That's not a big deal for some of us (I've been using Smoothwall Linux as my router/firewall for forever), but it is a cost factor.

Ubiquiti tells us that the new devices will be available in retail channels starting next week in limited quantities and widely available a month or so after that. We’ll have our full feature-length review, with benchmarks (and, yes, buffer bloat testing!) in a few weeks—if you have anything in particular you’d like us to try out, drop a note in the comments below and I’ll add it to the review to-do list.