UniFi Wireless

[earlyriser]

Great to hear that our Antipodean cousins have also smelt the coffee, unfortunately the air is so polluted over here its hard to get people to smell it even when its right under their noses.
As a nation of folk who are used to making every dollar stretch as far as it can go it comes as no surprise to find its been successful down under.

Oh to be back in the Bay of Islands....

Don't worry, it's getting more and more polluted over here as us ex-pats arrive in the thousands The Bay of Islands however, remains as beautiful as always....

[m25man]

A live feed of Unifi in action..jgsys-tv on USTREAM: .

All devices are BYOD

[danielstucke]

This all sounds a little too good to be true. I'm looking at a new school-wide network, covering 42 classrooms plus offices & communal spaces. Costs clearly vary hugely between different solutions. Would this hold up to a 700 device network including a lot of iOS devices?

Is it a software only controller? So would we just need to buy lots of access points?

Thanks in advance!

[Achandler]

Yes, it should be fine. You just need the access points.

We have 35 points and an average of 250 devices on it absolutely fine, though I have seen 350 before. Including 80 or so staff iPods.

[Joel]

Are the access points POE? If not, are there adapters and how do these work?

[Achandler]

Yes they are PoE, you get inline adapters with the products or you can buy adpaters to work with a PoE switch.

[soveryapt]

You know, the more I read on this thread the more:

a) I'm tempted to buy a 3 box set for c.£200 and install it at home
b) regretting buying a number of NetGear ProSafe Points that I've installed around the school and wished I'd known more about this at the time as for the same money it looks like I could have done a lot more!

Meh .. ah well .. live and learn ..

[Achandler]

i stumbled across these by accident to be honest when speaking to a Wifi Solutions company and have used them ever since.

[Dave84]

I couldnt find any info on it but do the access points support 5Ghz Wireless N?

[RobFuller]

Yes they do have 5GHz AP's but they cost a bit more from what I have seen, have a talk with 4gon they also offer educational discounts too.

[plexer]

Wow on the prices they have listed you save 10p by buying a 3 pack instead of 3 individual points.

Ben

[RobFuller]

Every penny counts! lol

[plexer]

Indeed, allthough the mini ones are even cheaper.

Ben

[m25man]

The cost of shipping the 3 packs is the same as the singles as everyone has different requirements after a while we found that stocking both was a false economy.
Yes there is a lot more packaging but the economics of bulk shipments make them a nonsense.

The instant AF adapters are the only way to power these from an AF Compliant Switch they are Passive 24v THEY ARE NOT af compliant if I have to hear one more idiot that buys these from me complaining that they don't work, I will scream!
RTFM before you plug them in!
I make a big point of emphasizing this and include it in all of the presales but you can not imagine how many people still order them and try to run them directly of a PoE switch.
Unfortunately a second brain cell is not included in the kits!

We will have a 5, 8, 16 and 24 port dual mode 24/48v Midspan available shortly for those that need high density deployments.

NO there are no 5Ghz versions available yet. As soon as they are I will post.

If you are seriously considering Unifi as a solution PM me and I will be happy to demonstrate a live system and discuss the advantages AND disadvantages.

Just because Unifi might be one tenth of the price of some high end systems it does not make it the best choice. I will never recommend anyone buy more than 3 on a first order.
Test it, trial it, deliver it. The only people that return them are those that are too ignorant to do some proper research and read the paperwork everyone else ends up deploying dozens and never look back.
Ubiquiti make some of the best point to point solutions in the world and are respected for it. Unifi is their first venture into enterprise wifi and are learning as they go each software release gets better (with the occasional bug) but they listen to what the users want and implement it if its viable.

Once again, the ONLY stupid thing you can do before buying that £20k system is not to try it!

[Paid_Peanuts]

Currently we have a Cisco solution comprising of a WLAN controller 4402 with 40 AP's: 1242ag models. Providing coverage to site wide access for 550 laptops.
Our existing solution is rock solid and have never had a problem. However we are in a position this year where we are replacing our 4+ year old laptops which currently have g network cards with new laptops capable of wireless n.

So i was thinking to get the most from the laptops we could do with upgrading our wireless to support 802.11n.
I was thinking i could replace my existing AP's with new Cisco wireless N AP's or I could look at a completly alternative solution.

How do you think the Unifi solution would stack up against our existing Cisco offering?

Other than laptops on the network we offer no guest access at the moment. The only other thing we do is we currently have 12 or so wireless VoIP phones which need the abaility to roam seamlessly from one end of the school to the other. Would this be ok with the Unifi kit or could we potentially hit issues there?

Any advice or thoughts appreciated!