Ubiquiti Unifi

[rok]

Hi Everyone,

 

We are a small primary (8 classrooms) and looking to upgrade our current simple wireless network. As we are likely to be introducing more mobile technology, eg tablets, in the near future it sounds as if some form of managed network would make sense. I guess we need to be able to support, ultimately, up to 30 devices connecting at the same time, and then being used within a single classroom. The available in-house technical support is not a network expert, so simplicity of management would be a benefit. Of course, cost is always a factor.

 

I have been trawling the site and it appears as if the cheapest and simplest option would probably by one based on Unifi, and that the more elaborate solutions would be unnecessary for a small school with, say, 10 access points. Is this a reasonable conclusion?

 

Assuming we go for Unifi, would it be installable by any old network support company, or is there some sort of Unifi-authorised installer list?

 

As you can probably gather, this is a all a bit of a dark art as far as I'm concerned, so any guidance would be welcome.

[synaesthesia]

We've just bought a pack of 3 to give it a test. We're a large secondary but just wanted an easy manageable solution that wasn't like our current setup (lots of random WiFi APs)

We're still in very early days as we've only had them a couple of days but it looks promising. Range is extremely good on them, they look unoffensive and would sit on a wall or on/in ceilings easily and they offer a very nice guest wireless system built in. The software is simple but works well - some neat little ideas like importing a map of your school and plotting the points on them with one click management therein. And that software is extremely unobtrusive.

I am without doubt quite a fan of Ruckus (when it's installed properly!) but it's easy to see where money soon goes with them even with special offers taken into account - controllers and licenses, then the AP's themselves. You should be able to get 9 unifi APs (3 packs of 3) for around £500 easily enough so it's a substantial saving.

And frankly if you know what you're doing with your school's network then you will have no problem installing these with the aide of your site super.

[twin--turbo]

Speak to Wireless Network Wireless Bridge Wireless WiFi Ethernet Bridge Specialists

 

Your situation sounds like a good candidate for Unifi,

 

It does not need a registerd installer, but somone will have to understand it to do a decent job.

 

Rob

[featured_spectre]

Without knowing the layout or having a site survey done it is impossible to say whether or not you need 10 or 50.

 

Also it may be worthwhile having various companies do a site survey. They're usually free and it will give you an idea of what you want.

[synaesthesia]

Bit of thought would solve that without surveys - one per class, staff room and communal areas perhaps.in a large school then yes but an 8 class primary I think it's wasting time and someone's resources.then again it's not your time so it's then just up to conscience!

[timbo343]

You could use the aerohive site survey to do it yourself, at least then you have an idea. We got Xirrus in to do a site survey for free so i could get a feel of what we needed and i was surprised to be fair however good job i was sat down though when i got the report and quote through.

[bodminman]

PM @m25man He's had ample experience of installing and using the Unifi kit.

[Oaktech]

Assuming we go for Unifi, would it be installable by any old network support company, or is there some sort of Unifi-authorised installer list?

 

If you are in any way handy with a drill and some trunking you could do it yourself - we have!

 

We are now running 12 of them and its fine, the controller is a little temperamental at times, but given that unless you have a multiple ssid/guest access config the units will operate happilly without the controller at all.

[lmgtfy]

I installed 60 Unifi Pro points over the summer at a total cost of around £10k. This was replacing a failing 3COM managed system that was about 5 years old and was falling over regularly and not coping with the increase of iPads and general WIFI connectivity. Although it was a big investment we have around 2300 students and 200 staff all of whom are able to BYOD. We also have 300 college laptops/tablets in constant use so it is heavily used. Just looking on the stats of the Unifi and it says we have on average 600 users connected at any one time in the day and around 30GB of data transferred per day. So far it’s been flawless but its early days I guess. We were quoted around £50k -60k from Aerohive plus ongoing yearly maintenance on top which wasn’t cheap for the same kind of setup so I think so far it looks like we made the right decision but I guess time will tell.

[synaesthesia]

I have to ask where you paid 10k for them - 60 points currently would be a shade under 7k! Unless of course thre's other management/install costs/bigger models in place

[lmgtfy]

We did buy the Unifi Pro point in the summer when just came out to EU market. We paid around the £170 mark each, they may have come down a bit now but really 60 points for 7K who is your supplier?

[m25man]

I've just added another 3 Unifi Pro's to our top floor office refurb and added another SSID and VLan for the Samsung Smart TV's

I only have about 30 users on these 3 APs in this location but we are going to be feeding them all with IP TV from our new CODFM MUX boxes most users are Press/Digital Media so that's going to be interesting!

 

If anyone is interested these are what we are using to stream our TV channels Pro Video Instruments HD Video Distribution Systems - Pro Video Instruments not cheap but will modulate any source onto DVBT for normal distribution whilst providing a Unicast or Multicast IP stream.

[synaesthesia]

Average selling price just about anywhere currently is a pack of 3 for £160+VAT

 

 

Who can spot who's *really* crap at maths?

[Chris_]

Average selling price just about anywhere currently is a pack of 3 for £160+VAT

 

 

Who can spot who's *really* crap at maths?

@chrisrowlands used the UniFi Pro access points which support 2.4ghz and 5ghz, gigabit uplinks etc..

 

Ubiquiti UniFi UAP-PRO 3 Pack

[plexer]

£518 for a 3 pack of pro ones from the link above so that's a shade over £10k.

 

Ben

[synaesthesia]

Ah, that's it then As well as being crap at maths I can't read either

[JRowley]

Synaesthesia, I was wondering how you were getting on with your testing of the Unifi system, we are a fairly large secondary school and are considering our options for a managed site-wide wireless system as well.

[synaesthesia]

Faultless really - not had to restart any of them which is a common requirement for some of the standalone stuff from other vendors. Guest access is great and easy to set up. Generally we'd just say "very easy, does exactly what it says on the tin". Our test setup is likely to expand over the coming months/years on requirement of guest networks but we need to adjust our DHCP setup I think for security and administration purposes. That makes it easy too, just being able to throw more points at it without worrying about licensing or hardware upgrades. Mostly we needed other access points which would have cost similar, and as a result we've been able to do away with our old 6th form wifi setup. The amount of people using the guest wireless even in it's current limited scope is impressive and indicative of our future intentions.

 

From what we've seen so far, I'd put them on a par with the Ruckus kit for reliability and a little easier to set up. However, I will stress it's very early days especially with only 3 points running.

[Oaktech]

Of our 12 points, we have had one point which kept falling over and requiring a hard reboot. We have fixed that now by taking the laptop that kept crashing it out of circulation.

 

The usage has gone through the roof, we have 140 staff and students registered to use their own devices on it, and 200 possible school laptops on it, from 8.30am to 4.30pm we don't see much less than 50 clients on it and it has peaked at 282 clients on 12 access points and no-one has complained about anything yet! We see an overall throughput of around 6gb a day, but the peak is 150gb.

[JRowley]

Thanks for the updates, I've read alot of very good things about this system. Out of interest are either of you using the Pro version with duel 1Gbps lan ports, or are you using the regular 10/100 version.

[m25man]

It's great to see so many happy Unifi users after bringing it to the Forum 18 months ago.

 

It still continues to improve and the developers are working on it all the time. It doesn't do everything and it requires some TLC from a committed admin preferably with some Ubuntu skills if you want it be be as stable as possible but its still the cheapest managed solution out there especially for those on the tightest of budgets.

 

Even though the Pro's are £170 each the trend is now definitely towards them, I deployed one in a school Monday and by Friday they had three. The smile on people's faces when it just works when everything else failed or was too expensive to contemplate.

 

At one location we have 30 APs across 2 sites all with Guest access and control, with the Academy about to come on line at site #3 with another 5 Pros and a 5.8ghz bridge.

 

It does what it says it will, the end.

[synaesthesia]

We're just using the 10/100s - the price made them comparable to off the shelf AP's so it was an easy sell.

[TronXP]

We have been trying out Unifi for a while and have been so impressed, that I ordered 15 pro AP's this week, and we will be buying more when budget allows.

[m25man]

Thanks for the updates, I've read alot of very good things about this system. Out of interest are either of you using the Pro version with duel 1Gbps lan ports, or are you using the regular 10/100 version.

 

FYI, the Secondary Port on the pro is purely a bridge port, it doesnt even have PoE passthru (which would have been useful to power a camera) so it seems a bit of a lame accessory at present.

 

What I have done however is to pull back cable from a wall outlet up to the ceiling to power the UAP Pro then fed a new cable back down to the wall outlet using the Bridge.

Saved running a new feed all the way back to the switch.

@JRowley If your going to use the UAP Standard remember these are only 12-24v Passive PoE they DO NOT run directly from a PoE switch you MUST use the provided 24v adapters.

There is a 48v to 24v in line converter available for an extra £20 each however these have a habit of going up in a puff of smoke so dont waste your money on them.

Ubiquiti now do a 5 and 8 port PoE switch especially for these things but they cost arount £20 per port anyway.

[Chris_]

@JRowley If your going to use the UAP Standard remember these are only 12-24v Passive PoE they DO NOT run directly from a PoE switch you MUST use the provided 24v adapters.

There is a 48v to 24v in line converter available for an extra £20 each however these have a habit of going up in a puff of smoke so dont waste your money on them.

Ubiquiti now do a 5 and 8 port PoE switch especially for these things but they cost arount £20 per port anyway.

 

Eeek! We've deployed a load of standard UniFi APs across our sites (with very good results) using HP PoE Switches with the Ubiquiti inline adapters. We've had one fail so far... Should we be expecting a lot more of them to fail?!