UniFi 5G

https://blog.ui.com/article/introducing-unifi-5g

by janandonly • 8 months ago

373 309 8 months ago

blog.ui.com

cromka4• 8 months ago

The fact that the outdoor version is directional kind of limits its adoption in mobile usage, doesn't it? Most similar products have omnidirectional antenna. Can't imagine you would rotate it by hand on a boat towards the land while on passage

gvkhna• 8 months ago

I think it’s going to be targeting mostly stationary HA redundant uplinks. Backup for primary uplink or low usage primary link. In those scenarios pointing at your nearest antenna fixed is much better than an omnidirectional antenna.

cromka4• 8 months ago

They clearly mention mobile use and show it on the animation as well. Which is why I am surprised.

botto2• 8 months ago

This product targets businesses where they will mount it in a fixed position and target a specific tower so they get the best throughput.

cromka4• 8 months ago

Did you read through the press release?

victorbjorklund2• 8 months ago

In their promotional video they call out mobile applications and they showing a car driving with it on top of it.

SigmundA3• 8 months ago

The spec sheet mentions 6 antennas and implies only 2 are directional:

(6) Embedded cellular antennas, including (2) high-gain for downlink: peak 9 dBi, 85°x85°

Typically these modems are 4x4 mimo so it must have some method for switching the 2 directional with 2 of the omnis in it based on which ones is needed.

https://techspecs.ui.com/unifi/integrations/u5g-max-outdoor?...

cromka4• 8 months ago

Interesting, thanks!

dagmx• 8 months ago

The fallback support for UniFi setups will be awesome.

I’m honestly tempted to get it for my house. My ISP downtime is pretty low but it does happen every once in a while, at the most inopportune times, which impedes working from home.

Having a wireless backup would hopefully cover those downtimes

botto2• 8 months ago

Yeah, the fact you can use any of the ports on a dream machine as a WAN (its not optimal, but is an option) makes it really easy to have a couple of fallbacks if you really need high redundancy.

qwerpy• 8 months ago

We had a 5 day power outage (Bellevue WA, not exactly in the middle of nowhere) and after 2 days both the cable internet and cell towers went down, so even 5G would not have helped. I had backup power but no internet. On the way back from Best Buy with my new starlink, everything came back online of course. But now I’m ready for the next multi day outage.

I have a network cable from my secondary WAN port on my dream machine running to my first story roof where there’s a wall mount ready for starlink to be plopped in.

thatwasunusual• 8 months ago

after 2 days both the cable internet and cell towers went down, so even 5G would not have helped.

I discovered the same thing the hard way myself recently (in Norway); turns out that cell towers only has enough battery for ~24-36 hours (if you're lucky).

However, someone messing with the fibre to my house is a bigger possibility than power outage, so I'll probably end up with this 5G product. :)

lostlogin• 8 months ago

I’ve made the second WAN a 10gb uplink.

I wish there were cheaper 10gb switch from Ubiquiti. The link Agg is good, but still pricey.

killingtime742• 8 months ago

I used to do that. Now I use starlink as backup

CTDOCodebases2• 8 months ago

Starlink has a specific backup plan too don't they?

ansgri• 8 months ago

There are now quite a few options for wifi APs with cellular backup. I use TP-Link, and it's ok for the price, I guess, and supports adding OneMesh range extenders.

The problem with this setup for me is that it doesn't work with uplink that sometimes becomes unstable yet nominally working, and in general LTE fallback triggers slowly.

Are there any prosumer-friendly options for connection bundling, which can balance uplinks continuously?

9x397• 8 months ago

Assuming you're talking about running like a UI router and doing multi-WAN uplinks from it, you can.

They support load balancing (e.g. 95% WAN1, 5% WAN2) and SLA monitoring (ping/packet loss/jitter) with some voting options on what triggers a swap.

I think pfsense has similar options for WAN balancing if you don't like UI for routing.

sschueller3• 8 months ago

I have a wireless backup[1] using Vyos[2] and a 5G router provided for free by the 5G service provider for those rare moments when both fiber links are dead.

At the same time I would never recommend anyone get 5G internet as their primary service if you have other options and especially not from one of these cheap providers.

[1] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/

[2] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/vyos-router-update/#wan-f...

sofixa2• 8 months ago

Hey, another person running VyOS!

How are you handling updates? Do you update on a fixed cadence, or do you build your own LTS? Or do you just take a random nightly and stick to it?

sgarland2• 8 months ago

Forgive me, I didn’t watch the videos: is that what the Dream Router supports - normal wired WAN uplink, plus 5G failover? If so, yes, that’s very attractive.

I have a T-Mobile backup home internet plan, and when I had a rack set up, it was my failover from fiber. The Dream Machine Pro did auto failover and failback flawlessly. However, I recently moved, and am redoing my homelab so I have no rack right now; internet is from a Dream Router, so I don’t have auto-failover. I doubt I’d buy this for the small window of time I expect to be in this situation, but if you didn’t have or want a rack, an AIO with failover would be great.

kmfrk• 8 months ago

Yep, that's one of the main reasons people are excited for this. Instead of a dedicated ISP modem with 5G, you can just use this, plug it into a gateway WAN port set up as the secondary failover connection, and you'll have a backup if you get knocked offline.

https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052548713-WAN-Failo...

The 5G unit itself also has its own failover with support for two 5G SIMs.

"All are equipped with dual SIM slots, with one SIM replaceable by eSIM, and are fully unlocked: any major carrier, any type of deployment, with one piece of hardware."

You can also see the excitement in the subreddit where people are already in the Unifi ecosystem: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/comments/1pe5xh4/explore_p....

jwr• 8 months ago

The 5G max outdoor looks very good and seems to be a direct competitor to the pretty good Mikrotik LHG series. I wonder about the antenna gain, though, the Mikrotik certainly looks more impressive.

(I've been using Mikrotik LHG LTE6 kit devices for years now)

Doohickey-d• 8 months ago

Antenna gain isn't everything: I've set up the LTE6 for people, and in some cases I was able to get more speed in the same location with the latest iPhone.

In locations where you're at the edge of coverage, and your phone is not getting anything at all, it's great.

I sometimes suspected that the modem in these LTE / 5G routers is less well tuned and tested with various network than what you have e.g. in an iPhone.

nicolaslem• 8 months ago

This is my experience as well. Unless you actually need a directional antenna, an iPhone will be faster and more reliable than dedicated hardware.

tecleandor2• 8 months ago

Of course it's faster!

The Mikrotik LTE6 device is a Cat.6 LTE device, so up to 300/50Mbits, and since some time ago, all iPhones are Cat.20 and 5G and all that stuff.

But that's not the only important thing. The frequency band support for the modem is very important. Not all networks nor even cell phone antennas work on the same frequencies, so even when connecting to antennas of the same company, depending on the antenna you connect, it'll have different bands enabled depending on the hardware or the connectivity they have there.

You have to check the specs for you modem [0][1] and see what bands are supported, what bands are supported in the antenna your connecting to [2]... Depending on the category of your device [3], and the channels that are allowed to be used at the same time, the congestion, the interference, and... it can happen than a consumer phone downloads faster than a dedicated industrial modem, if the available frequencies aren't the most favorable.

  0: https://mikrotik.com/product/lhg_lte6_kit#product_specification
  1: https://www.apple.com/iphone/cellular/
  2: https://www.cellmapper.net
  3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-UTRA#User_Equipment_(UE)_categories

kkapelon8• 8 months ago

direct competitor to the pretty good Mikrotik LHG series

Is there a Mikrotik 5G version though? I am still waiting for that.

Jnr2• 8 months ago

There is this now https://mikrotik.com/product/atl_5g_r16

flanked-evergl2• 8 months ago

Just bought a Gl.iNet Puli. It's only 4G but seems like a better option if you want to supply internet to some devices that you move around. Planning to use it for setup and management of a headless presentation PC as it can directly be connected to the LAN port.

walterbell• 8 months ago

Does it support eSIM? For backup internet, eSIM is good for avoiding monthly subscription, by paying per GB when needed.

flanked-evergl2• 8 months ago

I have read that people managed to get an eSIM installed on it, but I think there are also physical eSIM options. See https://www.gl-inet.com/solutions/esim/

Edit: The SIMPoYo eSIM Physical Card (see https://www.gl-inet.com/campaign/simpoyo-cards/ ) seems really cool, may even be nice for a phone.

szszrk2• 8 months ago

I have a mobile 4g router from them and it supports physical esim. I even managed to get their suggested card for cheap. They have some support in their firmware to set it up, so you can do that fully on the router.

kkapelon8• 8 months ago

I am already doing what is shown in the video with Teltonika OTD500, fully unlocked and with esim support as well.

tow212• 8 months ago

How does the Teltonika work out for you - I nearly bought it earlier this year but it doesn't have support for external antennae. I'm just on the edge of 5G coverage and I'm not sure I want to splash out on something which I can't tune for decent reception.

Seems an odd omission for a ruggedised outside modem - the Unifi also seems to not support external antennae.

(I'd also prefer a unifi version just so it fits in the with rest of the networking infra I have in the mökki.)

kkapelon8• 8 months ago

OTD500 is antenna + router in a single box. There is nothing else needed. I just put it outdoors with a POE cable. Originally, I used it as a backup, but now I have an unlimited SIM, so I use it as a second internet connection.

If you mean the standard routers (like the Rutx50), Teltonika itself sells external enclosures with antennas. https://www.teltonika-networks.com/products/accessories/ante...

hardolaf5• 8 months ago

Yeah they're not really putting out new exciting technologies. But this is cheaper than every other equivalent solution on the market for sale today in the USA.

phoronixrly• 8 months ago

Can't wait for this to get OpenWrt support so I can buy it and the first thing I do to be to nuke the UBNT firmware.

johncolanduoni11• 8 months ago

Is OpenWRT on Unifi APs any good? I hadn’t heard of it before, and I couldn’t find any performance comparisons on a quick search. Ubiquiti has gone downhill on a lot of things the last 5 years or so, but their radio firmware has always been a step up (within their price range) for me. I wouldn’t mind ditching the Unifi controller software though.

yuvadam• 8 months ago

I don't recall their latest hardware is supported, but why would you want that anyway if you're not looking to go all in on their controller stack?

cathepsin• 8 months ago

I'm using an U6+ with OpenWRT on it, flashed straight after unboxing and it's the only thing serving wireless in my household

It's alright except for some shenanigans with DHCP trying to compete with the router, I fixed that by just disabling DHCP on the AP if I recall correctly.

Speeds are pretty much as advertised on the box, the main thing using wireless is the TV as it has a 100mbit LAN port and it it's always smooth sailing. VLAN-separated SSIDs work great as well.

kkapelon8• 8 months ago

There are several other companies (e.g. Teltonika, glinet) that offer similar solutions that can use OpenWrt today

ur-whale• 8 months ago

We're doing ads on HN now?

skrebbel• 8 months ago

I see you've never opened HN during an Apple product launch event

grim_io• 8 months ago

Sir, this might not be a Wendy's, but this is a VC owned site that regularly shills its questionable investments.

johncolanduoni11• 8 months ago

And for most of the people here, buying any 5G mmWave modem is a questionable investment.

haunter• 8 months ago

The majority of posts are ads on HN

Did you know there is an entire post category for ads and self-promotion? https://news.ycombinator.com/show

tucnak3• 8 months ago

Up to 2 Gbps downlink
2.5 Gbit/s PoE to upstream switch

Can anybody explain to me why these supposedly premier networking devices are lacking so much in bandwidth? I get it that mmWave is really only ever realistically going to hit 2.5G over the air, but is there any reason why they're not willing to provide at least 10G copper, or an actual SFP port? Hell, even Macs support 10G these days. I never understood this. Do they mean 2 Gbps downlink per client, or per device in total? If it's the former, 2.5G wired seems like a major bottleneck to any serious consumption.

If a single client at 2 Gbps is all the promise of 5G amounted to, well, it would be disappointing to say the least.

fulafel3• 8 months ago

The whole 2.5 G spec is a weird step for ethernet speeds too. It's unfortunate it took off.

tucnak3• 8 months ago

They said the same thing about 40G but hey, I've loved it for bridging the gap between my two (10G and 100G, respectively) Mikrotik switches. You can have a dozen Gigabit ports, as well as up to four true 10G devices on your aggregation switch, and neither would be bottlenecked by traffic to and from the backside. This has been a massive boon. However, when it comes to 2.5G, I struggle to find one good reason to use it; such a tiny step-up in bandwidth, and for what?

jasoncartwright• 8 months ago

I think you answered your own question - also the places where mmWave is available, there is also often other better internet connection options.

johncolanduoni11• 8 months ago

This is a modem, it itself is the client of a cell tower/base station. So unless you put it in a faraday cage with the base station next to it, 2G is almost certainly enough.

The better reason to put a 10G transceiver in this would be that some (cheap, honestly garbage) SFP+ transceivers can’t negotiate anything between 1G and 10G. But I’ve only seen that on bargain-bin hardware so I don’t know that they should be designing products around it.

hedora3• 8 months ago

This device is PoE. I’d guess peak wattage has a lot to do with it.

tecleandor2• 8 months ago

Probably because of the PoE. That discards SFP+, and makes difficult PoE over copper, as you'd probably need 802.3bt PoE++ (that probably most of the Unifi devices aren't compatible with), or a very short cable to avoid interference.

10Gb interfaces also tend to run quite hot and be a bit power hungry.

This is a device that needs to be in a location with good 5G reception, so it makes sense to be PoE powered so you can put it near a window or in the location that gets the best reception, and only run a long ethernet cable. And, although I don't like it too much, 2.5G or 5G NBASE-T is the nearest thing that covers 5G speeds.

The 2Gb downlink speed is the 5G downlink, the max for the whole 5G connection, so 2.5Gb ethernet is enough for that.

amelius3• 8 months ago

These things are nice when they work but when they don't you're completely in the dark. Even figuring out how much GB is left on your simcard is a nightmare.

kkapelon8• 8 months ago

Simplest solution is to get an unlimited card. Problem solved.

amelius3• 8 months ago

Why do limited cards even exist? Turns out there are various reasons (no need to go into them here).

sschueller3• 8 months ago

I am confused, this is just a 5G router right? Like the 5 year old Huawei CPE Pro 2 but with wifi7, poe and eSim?

[1] https://consumer.huawei.com/en/routers/5g-cpe-pro-2/

sz4kerto• 8 months ago

It's a modem, not a router.

b-karl• 8 months ago

There are both, the router is further down the page

kkapelon8• 8 months ago

Unifi is the Apple of networking gear. When something new is released the HN crowd is excited even when the same functionality existed already with another company.

amelius3• 8 months ago

Apple of networking? I suppose no OpenWrt then.

johncolanduoni11• 8 months ago

For wireless, the prices aren’t much different from products with comparable feature sets/performance. For some niche combinations, they’re the only option that doesn’t force you way upmarket (Meraki, etc.). Most of the money they make is from small business and tiny WISPs, not HN boosters overdoing it on their home WiFi in what must be a bid to get their partner to divorce them.

Their wired stuff is a total scam since Edgerouter fell off, though. The same functionality exists on a $50 netgear managed switch (or wired router, etc.), and the shitty unified configuration interface doesn’t justify the markup at all.

a3w• 8 months ago

Ah, this is a Ubiquity product. That explains it.

Why did AVM or Netgear Orbi not get this treatment for "works", though?

rafaelmn• 8 months ago

I recently bought their cloud fiber gateway and two in wall wifi 7 access points because I'm setting up a network in my new apartment and hear this multiple times.

Honestly they are nothing like Apple - like just look at their mobile apps - how many do they have - 10 ? To interact with the same gateway just for slightly different use-cases. Not to mention that the functionalities are hard to decipher

inopinatus• 8 months ago

More like the Sonos of networking gear, in that they were once kinda cool but squandered it with questionable product decisions.

jsheard2• 8 months ago

They have the form-over-function aspect too, in that they decided to keep the external design language consistent across the board no matter what. Which meant they couldn't improve the passive heat dissipation enough to keep up with newer network standards, and had to resort to putting fans in their WiFi APs to keep them from overheating.

beAbU2• 8 months ago

To be fair, they have a nice ecosystem for networking nerds. I got a Dream Router last week for black friday and I'm super happy with it. Setup was like 20 seconds.

I'm looking forward to getting more Unifi gear in the near future.

synergy20• 8 months ago

the founder himself was an Apple hardware designer

SkyPuncher2• 8 months ago

Unifi is a bit different than Apple to me.

Ubiquiti is one of the few companies doing prosumer hardware - and doing it extremely well. They give you access to advanced, raw configurations without necessarily having to go "full enterprise" deployment. They also have solutions for just about everything.

That being said, I generally have moved towards other Wifi solutions as I've grown weary of tweaking Ubiquiti all of the time. I found that I could get better top-end performance out of Ubiquiti gear, but really struggled to hammer out poor performance in edge cases. Particularly, with jitter and random latency spikes.

My consumer mesh wifi system gets nowhere near it's advertised performance, with little way for me to tweak it. However, I rarely need "full performance" and it doesn't suffer from the same random glitches.

bitexploder• 8 months ago

I still like them. I have almost no real complaints about their products. They just work for me. Here is an example: I had a Netgate with pfsense for my home gateway. My primary home internet provider can be a little flaky, so I have a beefy 5G gateway backup. It was way too hard to configure one of the ports to support automatic WAN failover. The, less expensive, unifi product just worked. It was just a simple setting in the gateway's management UI. The information provided in the dashboard is rich and it implements things like constant QoS monitoring that has a nice plot. It adopts and manages my home wifi and makes it super easy to configure channels, analyze congestion, and do all the deeper technical configuration I could ask for.

Another example, I had Frigate set up on a home rolled NAS. Again, it worked alright, but it always stole time from me. It always needed a little maintenance or tweaking or thinking. I bought a UNVR and modern Unifi cameras. Adopted, zero thinking or management from me. I still retain control of my data and it respects my privacy. It isn't perfect, but at the price point it solved meaningful problems I cared about in both cases. Yes they are commercial products and not open source, but they are priced reasonably to my eyes (the UCG ultra was actually cheaper than the netgate). That makes me a happy customer.

I have run their wifi APs for over a decade with no problems. It's not perfect, I know there are still privacy concerns. No company is really perfect, but they are good to me.

baby_souffle• 8 months ago

Unifi is the Apple of networking gear

They were founded by some people that left Apple.

ndsipa_pomu• 8 months ago

I've got some old Unifi gear and there's a couple of things that make them unlike Apple.

Firstly, I can run the network controller easily in Linux (in Docker as it happens, but the image is third party - jacobalberty/unifi). It's happily running on Raspberry Pi.

Secondly, I've got one really old access point that is now unsupported for updates, but apart from that, there's no problem with controlling it along with the supported ones.

Also, I don't need a cloud connection though they do encourage using one.

xp842• 8 months ago

This seems like a stretch. If your position is that the REAL experts are using Cisco gear instead, I guess fine. But the "HN Crowd" loves using Ubiquiti at home because it is light years better than any consumer brand, (1) in terms of giving people who know what they're doing sufficient control to do so, (2) in terms of performance, and (3) in terms of not being a buggy piece of crap.

Contrast with:

(1) eero has no web UI (ONLY mobile phone!) and almost zero network configurability. You can't set a hostname for instance for DHCP. You can have exactly one main and one guest network. You don't get to configure anything about it though. Etc.

(3) I bought a Linksys replacement for my Eeros to get 6E -- I returned it to the store due to how horrifyingly bad the Web UI was and how bad the "app" was too. AND it also had flaws like inability to have reservation IPs outside the DHCP pool range.

Apple is actually the opposite of Ubiquiti -- they don't want you to be able to configure anything or have any visibility into anything. It either 'just works' or just silently fails or fails with "An error occurred."

j45• 8 months ago

Not quite, DIY vs technologies like Unifi make it accessible to the masses where the former is for the few to feel good about themselves, and the latter makes a difference in moving things forward for the many without as much investment in time, because people shouldn't have to be free employees of technology to derive a benefit..

"Just works" means you can enjoy other parts of technology, like what you do with it, instead of just getting and keeping it working.

johncolanduoni11• 8 months ago

Sure, but it’s not manufactured in Ch- ah, nevermind.

mrweasel• 8 months ago

What it can do, and Ubiquity already had this as a separate product, is act as a fallback for you regular internet connection.

You can do the same with Mikrotik and a ton of configuration, the pitch with Unify is that it "just works".

kkapelon8• 8 months ago

"It just works" with Teltonika and Glinet as well. In most of the openwrt based routers multi-wan is already enabled. It is also very easy to do with TP-Link Omada (just enable a checkbox).

So, implying that Unifi is the only company that does this in an easy way is misleading marketing.

Comparing against Mikrotik is a very low bar.

theshrike792• 8 months ago

I have this exact Huawei as my failover internet connection, works perfectly except doesn't do PoE so I need to have a stupid wall-wart for it.

mjlee• 8 months ago

You can buy PoE splitters that will take ethernet in and give you ethernet + some power supply out. Looks like you need 12V/2A and a cursory search throws up a few options.

tyteen4a03• 8 months ago

This is perfect for me, who want to avoid Chinese-branded devices as much as possible.

alt2273• 8 months ago

Right, but do you know what radio chips they are using inside?

I would guess they are chinese...

kenmacd• 8 months ago

If you avoid Chinese-branded devices you should doubly avoid US-branded devices. See National Security Letters and Room 641A as a small subset of why.

huijzer• 8 months ago

The big question is why do we need 5g? My phone doesn’t support it and my internet is fast enough as long as I have good coverage. Coverage problems are only exaggerated by 5G since the range for short waves is shorter

xzjis• 8 months ago

Back in school, I had a teacher who was in charge of installing 3G, 4G, and 5G antennas for a carrier in France. The answer is that the 4G frequency bands are saturated, and they pushed 5G mainly to relieve congestion on the 4G network. Theoretically, 5G has just as much range (maybe even a little bit more with beamforming) on the 700 MHz and 800 MHz bands.

wkat42422• 8 months ago

5G has lower latency again than 4G. There's also more capacity making it possible to use it as a real connection than just backup.

beAbU2• 8 months ago

Not everyone has cable/fibre/wifi in their homes, and need to resort to 4/5g cellular services in order to be online.

This product is aimed at those people who want something nicer than the 5g router bundled with their plan.

Arbortheus• 8 months ago

Where I live, all the 4G is oversaturated and really slow.

sorenjan• 8 months ago

5G does not mean shorter waves/higher frequencies, that's just a common deployment. In Sweden we have 5G on the 700 MHz band, 5900 MHz, and several others in between.

davidmurdoch• 8 months ago

It'd be a good option for failover Internet.

harrall3• 8 months ago

I’ve worked at companies with cellular failover for the most critical services.

5G in my city is 650 Mbps and is honestly cheaper than fiber, but my fiber has better jitter (and can go up to 2 Gbps). For a lot of people, 5G would be more cost effective.

cap112353• 8 months ago

See living near a concert venue. 4G behaves badly in a terrain of 100k phones

mlrtime• 8 months ago

Replying late, but show me where you can get a 5g modem, that is powered by POE, allows you to connect via a remote switch and automatically sets it as a failover wan to the router.

That was available 5 years ago?

yapyap• 8 months ago

I gotta say, I hate it when companies use “xxx bits per second”, whether its Mega or Giga nobody uses bits per second and for the average consumer it’s very unclear that this differs from bytes.

Having to explain to relatives and such that “yeah you actually have to divide that by 8” is a hassle and I get tricked by it subconsciously at times as well.

2 gbps meaning 250 megabytes per second is a SCAM. A marketing sham at it’s finest.

“I have 100 mbps download” meaning “I get 12.5 megabytes download per second” is ridiculous!!

AceJohnny2• 8 months ago

and how do you feel about HDD vendors (and Apple) using giga-/tera- for their strictly SI power-of-ten and not power-of-two meaning?

johncolanduoni11• 8 months ago

This ship sailed out of view a long time ago, the only GB you’ll see that is still base-2 is RAM. And that’s only because you literally can’t address physical RAM in non power-of-2 blocks in most architectures.

kortilla• 8 months ago

That’s not marketing related at all. It’s how network speeds have been measured long before ISPs were a business.

A byte per second is no more intuitive than a nibble per second or a bit per second. You might be used to byte as a power user because of storage, but I assure you that to regular people “256 gigabytes” is a meaningless number as well.

johncolanduoni11• 8 months ago

If you really want to piss people off, use Gibibits - 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bits. The ratio between those and Gigabytes is ~7.451.

poly2it• 8 months ago

I honestly feel mibi and gibibytes per second are the easiest units to rationalise about. The data I am transferring is already known to me in its binary prefix unit. Seconds for that data to transfer is a trivial translation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

tuetuopay• 8 months ago

Networking only uses bits/s. Nobody in the networking world talks in bytes/s, and pretty much nobody in the data transfer world does.

The only industry that talks in bytes/s is parts of the storage space, because they relate to files, that are measured in bytes/s. And even them use both: the data link is in bits/s (e.g. SATA 6 is 6Gbps, NVMe uses the same bits/s than PCIe (1)) while the drive is usually in bytes/s (µSD cards, NVMe SSDs, etc).

When you look at the industry at large, throughput is virtually always measured in bits/s. HDMI is in bits/s. Video codecs measures bitrates in bits/s. Audio codecs measures bitrates in bits/s. PCIe is in bits/s (1). Ethernet is measured in bits/s. Wifi is measured in bits/s. You get the picture.

The good thing about keeping it consistent is that values are relatable. Streaming services naturally talk in bitrate for the video quality, and your ISP also talks in bits/s. You can compare the two numbers. Bytes/s is only really useful for on the spot jobs that you do once, like transferring photos from an SD card to your computer. Otherwise, it's just a unit.

(1): ackhstually pcie measures speeds in transfers/s because they include the 8b10b/64b66b encoding overhead and TLP overhead but I digress.

sgarland2• 8 months ago

Wait until you find out about network endianness.

jonplackett2• 8 months ago

I wish website designers would remember that not everyone can see great. This text is so fine and light and they’ve also disabled screen reader

nake89• 8 months ago

Firefox reader view gives me better contrast. Also the text to speech mode works in reader view.

quantummagic• 8 months ago

Have you tried Firefox Reader View? It allows you to set whatever text size and font is best for you.

szszrk2• 8 months ago

oh, I didn't noticed that at first, but you are right.

What I did noticed is so many fast videos right next to text. I didn't even bother to read it (without firefox read mode) because it makes me a bit dizzy.

Orygin• 8 months ago

Even if my vision is okay, it still feels like a slap to the face. Can't take some time to make sure the most important part of the page is readable by all.

jonplackett2• 8 months ago

I specifically have issues with strong back lighting (genetic cataracts suck - I’m only in my 40s) so bright white page and light writing is super frustrating. Dark mode is my best friend.

Semaphor4• 8 months ago

OT: Does anyone know of a setting or extension for Firefox to stop those autoplaying videos? I have gifs disabled, prefers-reduced-motion on, and those videos in that article both autoplay, and start again after pausing them manually. I have no idea what the article is about (except what the title says) because I kept getting distracted by the annoying videos.

uallo• 8 months ago

Settings => Search for "Autoplay" => Click "Settings..." => For "Default for all websites" select "Block Audio and Video".

Semaphor4• 8 months ago

Thank you, I could have sworn I had that active, but for some reason it was "audio only".

slumberlust• 8 months ago

Thanks, I also noticed they allowlisted the FF about page...which is a bit cheeky.

Asmod4n• 8 months ago

I’ve got their unifi mobile router 4g and am quite happy with it in conjunction with one of their routers which got two lan ports you can either run in primary/primary mode where it does load balancing or primary/secondary one where the latter only gets used when the main one has issues.

I just kinda wish multipath TCP or something similar would be more in use so you wouldn’t notice a swap in connection mid air.

jnsaff22• 8 months ago

So Ubiquity is trustworthy again?

After the 2.4GHz wifi issues with UDM I swore I will never buy them again.

KerrAvon• 8 months ago

I've been running a base UDM for a long time without any 2.4GHz issues -- is there something specific that was broken?

jnsaff22• 8 months ago

A few years ago I was running my UDM. Wifi on 2,4GHz and 5GHz was working fine. Then after an upgrade some of my devices start losing connectivity after a while, happened multiple times a week or day. Only restart helped.

I was going mad until I discovered that only the 2,4GHz ones are losing connectivity. Then I started researching and found out that it was not just me, it was just bad code in firmware that was not fixed in any of the versions that came out before I had enough, sold the device and swore off this garbage.

daft_pink2• 8 months ago

Do you know if we can use the T-Mobile home Internet? I think they require their own modem, but I’m not sure.

syntaxing4• 8 months ago

You can if it supports IMEI spoofing (which I doubt). You definitely can use GL inet 5G routers if you want an alternative

daft_pink2• 8 months ago

In their video, it looks like it Supports T-Mobile

dismalpedigree• 8 months ago

The problem I have seen is when I need it most, due to a rare fiber internet outage, so does everyone else nearby and cellular data becomes saturated and unusable.

turnsout• 8 months ago

In locations where fiber is not available (like my place), cable is the next best option, and cable has a lot more unexpected downtime. I could see this being a good backup, especially for small businesses like retail shops that couldn't afford to have their POS go down for half a day.

hedora3• 8 months ago

Around here, it’s Starlink >> Fiber >> Cable because our lines are above ground and outages are frequent.

Fiber is less expensive than and more than 10x faster than starlink, in fairness.

Our 5g towers seem to run off the fiber lines, so it’s not really a backup (and gets overwhelmed anyway).

I’m considering getting fiber in addition to starlink, but I wish they’d just buried the lines.

I see telephone trucks repairing downed lines we’d rely on many dozens of times a year. Digging a trench would probably pay for itself in a year or two.

gsibble3• 8 months ago

I would normally love this device, except I already have 2.5gbit fiber AND cable. They work for load balancing and failover.

Now I can't decide if I need a 3rd WAN.....

matthewfcarlson2• 8 months ago

Agreed retail is a good customer for this tech. But even after getting fiber personally, it gets cut a lot by landscaping crews. Most of the time it’s a residential line that takes a day to fix. But a few times it’s been a main line and it takes 3-4 days. Maybe I’m unusual but that’s been my experience

matthewfcarlson2• 8 months ago

I keep an old Starlink in a closet for this exact reason

marcosscriven• 8 months ago

Does Starlink have a temporary or “pay as you go” option?

ttul• 8 months ago

So I'm not the only guy doing this...

xnyan• 8 months ago

You may or may not be aware, but all plans rack and stack somewhere in a priority list called QCI (Quality of Service Class Identifier). AT&T, for example will put at QCI 7-9 depending on your plan.

syntaxing4• 8 months ago

Would be useful for 5G home internet if they had IMEI spoofing but I would doubt it. It sucks how the gateway from these services do not have external antenna support.

hedora3• 8 months ago

Yeah; California’s network neutrality laws include a provision banning discrimination based on device type.

I’ve never heard of it being enforced, and blatant violations of it are the norm.

zekyl314• 8 months ago

I was hoping this was a mini 5G cell tower that connected to the network, so you could have good 5G service inside.

powvans• 8 months ago

I need a portable mini 5G cell tower in a backpack form factor so that I can have 5G service indoors no matter where I am.

Scene_Cast2• 8 months ago

With what backhaul? WiFi?

macNchz• 8 months ago

Those do exist, they’re called cell signal boosters. Once upon a time, I believe, some American cell providers would give you one for free if you had bad signal at home, which mattered a lot more before phones all had wifi calling.

joecool1029• 8 months ago

Those do exist, they’re called cell signal boosters.

No, those are different. They are describing a femtocell. I still have one site with a T-Mobile one. It basically VPN’s to T-Mobile’s network core through the cable ISP, uses GPS to check its location for licensed spectrum, and then broadcasts its own LTE signal. It does not boost/repeat the signal of a nearby tower, it runs its own.

andix3• 8 months ago

Do they work for 5G? I think just amplifying the signal (like 2g signal boosters did) would mess with a lot with all the fancy RF tricks that make 5G fast, stable, low-latency and quite low on package loss (5G has impressively low package loss on the IP layer).

For most use cases WiFi should be the better solution. VoWiFi works well for calls. Should be enough for home and office use.

superxpro12• 8 months ago

FWIW, MMS and SMS are still left in the dust in this situation, as I have this exact issue.

andix3• 8 months ago

I think in the US there are even public 5G frequencies that can be used. In most of Europe you would need to buy an expensive license to do that.

Private 5G networks usually need internal eSIM cards, you can't just let public devices roam into the private 5G net.

Benefits of 5G over WiFi: much better roaming between APs, higher distances, and better congestion management if there are hundreds of devices connected to a cell.

mrbluecoat• 8 months ago

US Verizon SIM support?

stego-tech• 8 months ago

I think Verizon is an eSIM option on the modem; dunno about the Router version, but I’d want to assume it’s the same?

Either way, having modems that are fully unlocked for Stateside usage for once is a nice touch. Their LTE line was essentially AT&T-locked, or unlocked but only supporting AT&T in the US, so this is a nice improvement.

wkat42422• 8 months ago

I'm glad it has a physical SIM still. I always use regular prepaid phone plans for my 4/5G backup but the providers don't like these being used with modems. So they have more options to block them with eSIM.

xiconfjs• 8 months ago

FAQ: "Can the UniFi 5G Max Outdoor work as a standalone device?" -> No. The UniFi 5G Max Outdoor must be adopted by a UniFi Cloud Gateway or UniFi Gateway and cannot function independently as a router or modem.

grayhatter• 8 months ago

Yeah, exactly how I feel! This is disappointing. I remember, and miss the days when UniFi wasn't as user hostile as they have become.

happyopossum• 8 months ago

They literally list the standalone version further down the page:

* Dream Router 5G Max: The Fully Integrated UniFi Experience *

kllrnohj6• 8 months ago

but that one isn't outdoor rated.

seneca• 8 months ago

The DreamRouter 5G Max is the stand alone device.

conception• 8 months ago

You can just download the software to configure/manage it. It’s not the best situation but you don’t have to buy anything.

gsibble3• 8 months ago

This device came out just after I already got Fios 2GB and Comcast 2GB for load balancing / failover.

If both of them go down, I doubt 5G will matter much. Not like I have a big UPS in the house anyways.

roflchoppa• 8 months ago

2Gbps?! I was testing out tmobile 5G service with their router and it’s only ~330Mbps down ~180Mbps up…

Can it really be that much faster?

harrall3• 8 months ago

I get 650 Mbps with T-mobile in my city.

jmb99• 8 months ago

I’ve seen 900Mbps with Bell in low-congestion areas at off-peak times, with an iPhone 13 Pro 5 years ago.

cap112353• 8 months ago

I have tmobile and a local provider for fiber. 5G Tmobile caps out around 912, similar to my fiber.

andix3• 8 months ago

I thought it would create a private 5G network to extend the unify WiFis. But it's just a fancy 5G modem, right?

varispeed• 8 months ago

I live near 5G relay and I was surprised that I could get symmetrical 1gbps connection, without any cables. Still remembering 56k modem, it feels like magic.

aynyc4• 8 months ago

My good friend is a network engineer and provider in NYC for decades now, pretty good one at that. Has anyone deployed UniFi in a computer centric professional environment? Just to be more specific a bit, computer centric professional environment means networks and computers are the primary way of getting job done. He hasn't seen any UniFi but his home is all UniFi.

ugh123• 8 months ago

I've seen Cisco meraki AP's on the ceilings at more than a handful of tech companies, if that helps.

aynyc4• 8 months ago

Thanks!

9x397• 8 months ago

Small businesses? Sure. I've seen Unifi networks with a few hundred MACs often enough.

Enterprises? Thousands, tens of thousands of employees? Generally cost isn't prohibitive at the scale so bigger ecosystems with more support make way more sense. Even their enterprise switches aren't really equivalent to Cisco, Arista, Juniper, etc enterprise offerings. They're inching forward, though.

aynyc4• 8 months ago

What kinda of small businesses? My friend does consulting and most of his business is on small (100-250 employees) size and sometimes small start up, typically in the office construction phase where he comes in and set up network infrastructure. He never seems anyone asking for UniFi, but again, might just because the cost? He feels UniFi is price competitive at that scale but no one wants it for some reason.

When he was with a larger company, cisco and juniper were the only options.

cmpxchg8b• 8 months ago

How does this differ from Invisagig?

QuiEgo2• 8 months ago

I really want to want Unifi, but my experience with one of their products (UDM + mesh) was that it was a ton of effort to get something working that ended up being slower and more fiddly than a consumer focused router. When I get home, I don’t want to be an unpaid sysadmin

kidfiji• 8 months ago

Check out Firewalla if your interest roots in tinkering :)

giobox• 8 months ago

While Unifi supports wireless backhaul/mesh, the entire system is heavily designed to encourage wired backhaul - all their wireless APs are PoE for a reason. If you are going to invest in the Unifi ecosystem, it makes sense to invest in decent networking - wireless "mesh" is always a compromise for running multiple wireless APs.

If you are in a situation you need multiple wireless APs but can't run ethernet to them (like renting etc), I'd probably pass on a Unifi system personally.

QuiEgo2• 8 months ago

Yeah this lines up with my experience. Had issues with mesh (I bought an AP with mesh in the product name that covered a wall outlet, no Ethernet in)(edit: it was the “beacon”), essentially was told “you’re holding it wrong.”, and moved on. They seem like lovely products for their intended use case, but my personal experience was not great.

Edit 2: I have eero now. The nodes seem to have some proprietary protocol that sends clients to the best node as you walk around the house. I can’t setup Vlans or do power user stuff, but my WiFi actually “just works” now. I don’t think I’ve touched it once after initial setup.

Etheryte• 8 months ago

What I really want to know is how much they paid to acquire ui.com and whether that investment is paying off in any measurable kind of way.

NelsonMinar• 8 months ago

I wonder if this works any better than their Unifi LTE Backup. That was so bad I gave up on it after about a month. The biggest problem was the weird way the router handled routes meant that with the LTE on the network, even when it wasn't being used a bunch of router features were impaired. Like static routes.

Ubiquiti makes some good hardware but their software is full of terrible bugs.

drnick12• 8 months ago

Why are people paying what seems obscene prices for UniFi stuff? You probably all have spare hardware lying around that can be repurposed as a router; it does not need to be modern. I use a Ryzen 5 as a general purpose home server/router/firewall running Linux and no ISP plastic box or expensive "prosumer" gear can't touch its performance. I can push 25Gbps through it (saturating my SFP28 LAN), or north of 4Gbps through Wireguard. For access points in a home setting, TP-Link boxes flashed with OpenWrt are also considerably better value and far more "free" (i.e., unclouded) than any UniFi stuff constantly phoning home for "updates."

npunt• 8 months ago

Perhaps you missed the product positioning: “Simple setup and clean design”

Not everyone wants to fix old hardware and configure linux on their weekends

drnick12• 8 months ago

Not everyone wants to fix old hardware and configure linux on their weekends

I thought this was Hacker News.

dawnerd• 8 months ago

I know I pay more for my unifi gear. I want stuff that works without having to hack around with it. I do enough of that in my day job. Their ecosystem works without needing to tinker. I love it.

Andrex• 8 months ago

The incredulity I feel at HN types hyping up UniFi is pretty high. A for-profit company centralizing commodity tech into a single point of failure, what could go wrong? We've been down this road before, the hype and "magic" is never worth it... Come on, guys.

aetherspawn• 8 months ago

How’s this go in direct sunlight, like 50 degree C ambient? Any experiences?

UniFi 5G

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