I'm done with Ubiquiti Unifi. Need help with alternatives.

[jinjuku]

I recently saw a demo on Ekahau's Connect/Sidekick 2 solution. Expensive, but seems like an interesting long-term investment, especially if you do large Wifi Networks often or you hate/wasting time on Wifi mapping

I have a Sidekick 2 along with Ekahau AI Pro. Just load up a map and waypoint along your path, set a gateway to ping, and get tons of telemetry about your wireless network environment.

 

[highfigh]

It's all trade offs, I do switch/route/mobility/firewall. On a project with 74 switches across 30 closets, new collapsed core, and 532 AP's that I'm doing the predictive design for.

The predominate design mandates are for a killer wifi network. We now spec connectivity at 3 wifi clients for every user and 1/8th wired for every user.

I got into this at AVS forum where they wanted to bring up a custom home (we are talking like $10M) and matrix 4:4:2 hdmi over IP. In that case yes you are putting in things like sfp+/sfp28 or 56, SM fiber, sfp+dd, or even odmf. Setting up multicast and 200gb core HA because you may have four 48Gbit streams on mcast terminating at your IGMP querier.

But for the bulk of home owners 2-3 wifi 6 with multi-gig ethernet AP's will more than meet demand.

It's crazy what you can do for well under $1000.

Compared to what we discussed in the networking class, 802.11 ac and beyond are crazy- as I wrote, 802.11n was on the horizon and that was supposed to top out at 150Mbps, dial-up was still being used, typical consumer PCs only had about 4Gb of hard drive storage and RAM was in single digit Megabytes with Windows XP being 'current technology'.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Compared to what we discussed in the networking class, 802.11 ac and beyond are crazy- as I wrote, 802.11n was on the horizon and that was supposed to top out at 150Mbps, dial-up was still being used, typical consumer PCs only had about 4Gb of hard drive storage and RAM was in single digit Megabytes with Windows XP being 'current technology'.

802.11ax is now the norm now, with 1Gig AP uplinks considered to be slow, 2.5gig, or faster preferred.
In addition to legacy 2.5 and 5ghz, the 6 GHz range is fairly new with Wifi 6E with next-gen Wifi 7 (802.11be) coming up soon.

 

[jinjuku]

Wifi 7 isn't going to be what everyone thinks that it is. You'll almost have to be standing on it to get any of the speeds claimed.

 

[highfigh]

802.11ax is now the norm now, with 1Gig AP uplinks considered to be slow, 2.5gig, or faster preferred.
In addition to legacy 2.5 and 5ghz, the 6 GHz range is fairly new with Wifi 6E with next-gen Wifi 7 (802.11be) coming up soon.

Is this speed in commercial/industrial? I haven't seen that in resi because gigabit isn't as wide spread as it could be and to be honest, most people don't want to pay the cost of the higher priced models. Besides, by the time their router can use gigabit, it will probably be ready for replacement, using the 3 year lifespan recommendation. I'm literally 250 yards from the border with Milwaukee and I can't even get Verizon high speed. Fiber is in the area, but not on many streets in my area.