Thinking about moving off Unifi - looking for advice

[Ranger]

Hi

For my home network I'm using a pair of Unifi UAP-AC-PRO access points wired to a Unifi Security Gateway as my router. The setup has been great: rock solid, reliable and they look neat.

However, to date we've had a lousy 10/1 connection over VDSL. We are about to get upgraded to 1000/1000 fibre. Now, whilst I know I'm never going to get line speed over WiFi, all reports suggest the Unifis will max out at around 350-400mbps with a 3x3 client right next to the AP. Would I be better out swapping the APs out for something like a pair of Netgear R7800s, or will consumer gear max out at around the same speed? I know in most scenarios you don't use anything like that bandwidth, but given how long we've suffered on the 10/1 link I'm keen to make the most of what's coming

Many thanks in advance.

 

[System Error Message]

mikrotik/pfsense is a better alternative. The RB1100AHx2 is the minimum for gigabit WAN without hardware NAT. Hardware NAT cant do QoS so with hardware NAT ubiquiti can handle it.

 

[Ranger]

mikrotik/pfsense is a better alternative. The RB1100AHx2 is the minimum for gigabit WAN without hardware NAT. Hardware NAT cant do QoS so with hardware NAT ubiquiti can handle it.

I *believe* the USG has hardware offload for NAT, and it will achieve ~930 on WAN/LAN so I assumed I'd hood onto that. I'll look into the Mikrotik though!

It's really the APs I had assumed would be the bottleneck, though. Happy to be corrected.

 

[netwrks]

If you are worried about wireless throughput on the AC Pro's, (400Mbps is the typical .ac client throughput) you can always buy and UAP AC-HD Kind of pricey). I wouldn;t want to go backwards (form Enterprise WAP's to home consumer stuff) . I have two AC Pro's at home. No one is complaining yet.. Can't comment on the USG stuff, but you can look at the ERL, PoE5, or the ERX. Try your USG first, and see what throughput you get.

 

[System Error Message]

you dont need to worry about wifi speeds much, think of this as a way of preventing 2 people from fighting over gigabit bandwidth in a high usage scenario.

Still i know ubiquiti has charts comparing their router to mikrotik and they used a very unfair comparison. They did follow what i've been talking about regarding which mikrotik device competes with which ubiquiti edgerouter though but the speeds used for mikrotik were ones reported by users who load their routers a lot typically WISPs, small time ISPs and internet cafes (basically places that also allow others to use their internet). These places load their routers more such as having to bear the processing use of hotspot with https and https redirect, many generated rules that affect speeds.

I know what the routers are capable of speed wise as i know the architecture of the CPU used so i can easily guess the performance more accurately in home use. Normally ubiquiti routers dont fully expose all this detail but on the edgerouters you can install htop and other task managers to see more details.

The USG/ERL can do 1.3Gb/s of NAT using hardware (not quite the 2Gb/s for a symmetrical 1Gb/s connection) but many would say it depends on your usage to whether or not you need the full forwarding speeds. When you add PPPOE however than the speed changes, as the ERL cant do 1Gb/s properly.

On mikrotik's side the RB1100AHx2 is great for 1Gb/s without hardware NAT, this gives you some leeway to burden it such as some QoS, firewall and PPPOE. The CCR1009 is much better for the price but mikrotik hasnt made tunnels multithreaded yet so using PPP/VPN/tunnels is restricted to 1 core per tunnel/connection so at the moment the RB1100AHx2 is better at this because of the architecture but this may change soon if mikrotik improves their firmware. Some of their routers can run dude which is a nice networking software from mikrotik that can display and manage your network and provide information based on snmp and other protocols.

Mikrotik's hardware NAT is also more flexible than ubiquiti's as you can split traffic to be accelerated or having to go through your firewall/QoS chain whereas ubiquiti's and other brands (basically every consumer router) will only do hardware NAT if there is no QoS but ubiquiti can still do hardware NAT with firewall rules.

For me i have both mikrotik and ubiquiti. I use my ERPRO more as a linux server than a router and my main router is mikrotik. Some things such as proxy work better with ubiquiti as you can treat it like a regular linux device and the ERPRO is capable of 80Mb/s of squid3 per core.

 

[KenZ71]

If you decide to move off the AC-Pros I'll gladly take them off your hands.

From my samsung S6 to my UAP-AC-Pro I see insane fast local transfers that rival my gigabit ethernet. Son's iPhone 5 seems to max out at 150.

Speedtest.net from unifi controller shows speeds of about 150 as well.

 

[thiggins]

If you look at the peak 5 GHz downlink charts, you see even 2x2 radios are capable of throughput > 400 Mbps.
https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/router/bar/187-5-ghz-dn-peak/31

But that is with an ideal client (the Veriwave test set).

Maximum 5 GHz downlink throughput, measured with a 2x2 Intel Wireless AC 8260 card provides a more realistic view and also shows throughput in the 500 Mbps range is still possible.
https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/router/bar/119-5-ghz-profile-dn/31?see=MAX

So, yes, changing to another AP or converted router could provide higher link rates. You could also open yourself to other hassles (device incompatibility, poorer roaming support).

 

[System Error Message]

peak throughput but not average throughput. To get peak throughput such as in my case near 800Mb/s there were a lot of packet drops in the process. The range was near and there was no other sources of interference and i got that bandwidth by forcing packets through using a CPU intensive bandwidth tester.

You should expect to see around 500Mb/s though on good APs with 2x2 clients.

 

[sfx2000]

For my home network I'm using a pair of Unifi UAP-AC-PRO access points wired to a Unifi Security Gateway as my router. The setup has been great: rock solid, reliable and they look neat.

The UniFi UAP-AC-PRO access points are fine - might consider an update/upgrade on the gateway - but you're going to be pressed to get better performance on the WiFi side - the UAP-AC-PRO's are pretty good...