Primus

We've got large secondaries using it too.

It is indeed wave 5 - emails seem to go to the HT from what we've seen (secondary) and still go there even after you respond and ask to be listed as the point of contact!

It's a discussion, I'm not missing the key points but you didn't answer my question - are margins lower on Unifi than they are on Cambium, Aruba or Meraki? Are you sure your opinions (and many others in the industry) are not based more on margin than anything else, that Unifi have come into the market as an upstart and upset the hierarchy somewhat? If they are then that's fine, that's how business works but to avoid the issue is disingenuous.

The answer is no, even if you added some support/extended warranty the price is still way below the quoted price for Cambium - you say they're not expensive but remember the like for like AP is 2.5x times more. There's plenty of experienced Unifi support available out there if you want it/want to pay for it - you could always invest in your staff and get them certified. I suppose if you want manufacturer support you're going to have to pay much more - across all our schools I cannot think where we've needed manufacturer support on any of our kit beyond the usual RMA process and we could afford to hold loads of cold spares and still save a fortune. Truth be told we could rip it out every few years and still come out ahead of spending more in order to get a 5 year warranty etc. It's clear you're aiming at a certain part of the market and there is a distinct level of snobbery within the industry when it comes to Unifi. I say all of this as someone without any financial interest in a particular school going with Unifi or not, simply as a long term user of the products and someone who likes to see the taxpayer getting value for money - schools have a finite pot of money, if we spend more in one area we have to spend less in another. We don't use their products at the core switch as they don't have anything suitable, but, by spending less on edge switching and APs this allows us to invest more into the core - our budgets are fine, we just manage them effectively. Are you denying margins are lower on Unifi than on manufacturers such as Cambium, Meraki, Aruba etc?

You say that, but you said previously and again in this post that you won’t recommend Unifi - so if a school doesn’t have the budget for anything more pricey you’d tell them you couldn’t possibly help and walk away? Or you could put some of your team through the Unifi certifications and support it yourselves. There’s definitely money to be made there. In the same way I’m now seeing companies offering more extended warranties for Unifi and holding stock themselves to allow for RMA - though as I’ve said we’ve got plenty of their kit and had only one RMA across it all. I expect the margin in Unifi kit is a lot lower though.

Oh I see you meant if you have EoL products you have to stick with their last controller release? Well yes, obviously.

The beauty of Unifi is you have multiple options for running it. We run it in a VM - there you even have choices - Windows or Linux. We run one controller and have all 5 schools in it as separate sites - makes managing it mega easy.

The very expensive Cisco kit that was put into a new build school by a supplier that had the top level Cisco certification but was EoL before it even went in? Yeah worlds apart from the much cheaper Unifi kit we've ended up putting in that is actually supported and will be for quite some time to come as it's the latest U6 Pros. There are clear differences between products but to suggest that my preference for Unifi is due to me having no budget is laughably out of touch - I have healthy budgets but I manage them and spend where appropriate, not just because of a brand name. Suppliers have a very clear incentive to push the more expensive options...

I must have missed that odd bit of the original comment by May - I keep our controller updated, have done for years, never once had it break. It's also not a traditional controller, most services work even if the controller is offline, it's mainly if you're using things like the guest portal that require it to be constantly on.

They did announce some products were going EOL but those products were not exactly new, they'd been available for quite a long time at that point. You can still use them provided you use the correct LTS version of the controller, obviously you're no longer getting firmware updates at that point and I'm not sure if there's any security issues with the existing firmware - I don't think I've seen anything. I've had much longer out of those AC-Pros than I have out of an inherited Cisco system that was fitted to a new build and already EoL at that point.

The 95 x AC-Pro I put in in 2018 are still getting firmware updates...

Every single manfucturer has issues from time to time - that is a fact. U6-Pro - £148.10 although that's 4x4 so the even cheaper U6-Lite at £100.80 is a better like for like example. No ongoing costs. If you'd like to put a warranty on it you certainly can beyond the standard 1 year - we prefer to keep cold spares - still way, way cheaper. For every XV2-21X you're deploying I can buy 2.5 of the equivalent Unifi AP - multiply that out across a reasonable size deployment and the difference is clear: 100 x XV2-21X - £25,000 100 x U6-Lite - £10,080

We have Nano HD APs, we've had no issue with them. I knew someone would come along with their "gotcha" - when you can find an alternative brand that has never had any kind of a similar issue then let me know - you can't and they all cost a lot more.

We've been running it for years across multiple sites with multiple different SKUs, it's not like there's some glaring issue we've not come up against yet. Every school/MAT should do its due diligence and select products that best meet their requirements including budget.

Unifi is absolutely fine in schools, we have it in all of ours for switching and all but one of ours for WiFi (ideally the last one will be getting it for WiFi too), it's so cheap you can afford to have cold spares and we've never had any issues with it. Out of 162 APs and 76 switches we've had only 1 AP die (someone threw water over the floor above and it came through so definitely not the AP's fault) and 1 switch die (died within 2 weeks of going in so I suspect the PSU was inherently faulty). Otherwise it's been rock solid and very cost effective. When we looked after only 1 school we always had at least 1 cold spare AP and 1 cold spare switch, now we're looking after a MAT we've upped those figures but not massively.

InVentry Central just doesn't work properly at all, we're in the process of a lengthy interaction with support trying to make it work - interestingly I keep hearing we're the only ones with issues and we're using it wrong!

And there has to be a punishment and a deterrent. The rest of the stuff about bullet fees etc is just going beyond ridiculous.

It's called vicarious liability and what else do you expect - schools/MATs to be allowed to break the law with no punishment? There very well may be consequences for individuals but we will likely never know.

We're still blaming Bromcom - if you want to blame anyone why not consider that a High Court Judge has upheld Bromcom's case and found fault with the process run on behalf of the MAT - is the school/MAT blameless?

You might want to take some legal advice on that.

No matter what? There's no circumstance where a supplier should?

On that basis do most of you all on here work for United Learning? The post has a very good point, the majority opinion on here still seems to favour the MAT even when a High Court Judge has found against the MAT on numerous issues and the judgment itself seems to hold that Bromcom should have won the tender. No one is perfect, no organisation is perfect and the reality is that there can and is fault on both sides, but the reaction of many has been pretty unfair, IMO. I say this as someone who was responsible for moving the schools in the MAT I work for to Arbor so I certainly have no reason to favour Bromcom.

Bromcom have won their case https://schoolsweek.co.uk/mis-bromcom-arbor-sims-united-learning-legal-case/

When is Maiden going generally available - I don't see it in my available updates - I too got the actions to rectify a little while ago and worked through them so in theory we're ready.

I completely agree.