About two months ago, I was thinking “why not get Wi-Fi 7” and got myself two Ubiquiti UniFi U7 Pro access points? Just to realize the experience sucked.
In fact, my family has faster browsing on a subjectively “inferior” access point, the MikroTik wAP ax which is being used now, as well as the prior HPE Instant On AP25.
Ubiquiti is often compared to Apple, and the UniFi dashboard goes look pretty damn good. After all, Ubiquiti’s founder and CEO worked for Apple. In comparison, Instant On is “okay” and MikroTik is definitely very uninviting.
UniFi has an excellent dashboard, while it needs no introduction, it’s simply the best Wi-Fi dashboard I ever had.
But when it came to the radios:
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My HP OmniBook Ultra Ryzen 9 AI laptop had flaky Wi-Fi on Linux, when it didn’t using MikroTik APs
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My mom’s iPhone 13 Pro Max had slow Wi-Fi, even when my M3 Pro MacBook Pro worked fine
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$120 MikroTik Wi-Fi 6 APs had faster browsing than $280 UniFi Wi-Fi 7 APs
Simply, the radios had ultra patchy Wi-Fi.
We are in NYC where Wi-Fi congestion is pretty bad, and we’re just in a 24-unit building. We’re probably moving to a brownstone with less congested Wi-Fi but no Verizon Fios so it’s probably AT&T Internet Air unless/until I get Verizon to wire.
In the past, I’ve tried Ubiquiti EdgeRouters and was certainly no fan of those either. Maybe it’s me but I’m more of a MikroTik person, even if MikroTik isn’t exactly cutting-edge.
Yes MikroTik is hard to configure, but their gear generally works well, including gear shipped from Latvia directly because no US seller sold them. In fact this includes not even designed for North American 5GHz wAP ax but works well in NYC anyways.
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t buy Ubiquiti gear or that Ubiquiti should become the Compaq or HTC of networking, it’s just that Ubiquiti sucks for me.