AmpliFi Alien

welcome to crosstalk solutions my name's Chris and today we're gonna be taking a look at the amplifi alien from Ubiquiti Networks now this is kind of an all-in-one router firewall access point and it's really designed or targeted towards home users right so this is sort of their prosumer or you know a high-end home user market there's a totally separate website for amplify this is just one of the amplified products that's out there I did a review of the original amplify mesh access point firewall probably about three years ago and this is one of the newer ones this is the amplify alien now what sets the amplify alien apart from any of the other amplify devices is the fact that it has Wi-Fi 6 in addition to the fact that it's supposedly really easy to mesh with other alien units or other amplify units and it has supposedly a really really easy setup they say one-minute setup let's get this thing out of the box now the MSRP on the amplify alien is $379 however they do have a second version also that has this alien access point slash router along with a separate mesh repeater that looks very similar to this one it's almost the same form factor but doesn't have the you know 4.7 inch touchscreen display on the remote mesh access point repeater thing so this is really really nice packaging again you can tell if they're going after the prosumer market here there's a little tab at the bottom oh look at that Wow yeah that is nice this thing's actually a little bit bigger than I thought it was gonna be what else comes in this box oh I'm gonna save this box and I want to throw this away so we have our QR code for the QuickStart guide and we have a router QuickStart basically says launch the amplify app and we're gonna get into the installation here in just a little bit it also has a nice flat black network cable and somehow I can get under here to get the there we go to get the power cord alright so there's the power cord as well again a flat black power cable that's it that's all that comes in this nice box Wow so Wi-Fi six now this thing will do all kinds of Wi-Fi it does 802 11 a B and G AC and then the new Wi-Fi 6 which is 802 11 a X wait man it smells new it smells like a new car smell almost oh wow that is nice alright so we have a couple of ports on here on the bottom we have power and then we have our way in port so you have one gigabit lan port on the bottom there's also a little reset switch reset hole if you want to reset the or to reset it to factory default settings and then on the back we have a four port gigabit switch and that's really it so let's go ahead and get this thing plugged in and we can start to take a look at the amplifi alien ok plugged it in we see a nice green glow on the bottom as this thing boots up oh wow and it says initializing and it's giving me a percentage count down here I do like the color scheme I like this sort of alien green color with the sort of rubberized black exterior on this thing it's really a quite as beautiful device all right so this has fully booted up says download amplify mobile app connect to alien Wi-Fi set up network so I need to connect my device here to the set up Wi-Fi network of the aliens we're gonna do that now alright if we look at our wireless networks we see the amplifi alien setup network we're gonna click on that there we go and now we have a login alright so here we go so here is the setup wizard ok name your wireless network we're gonna call this alien create your wireless password I'll use my very strong default password for these setups of one two three four five six seven eight nine zero and we're not going to use the same password for administration create your administrative password okay all right save and continue' Oh made a nice little noise and blink the light at me and then it kicked me off all right so it says amplify 32.5 update available right on the touchscreen here and then it looks like our amplify is running a speed test or doing something right now all right so I have the alien Wi-Fi network we're gonna connect to that boy that setup was quick that was literally about a minute and it does it's bugging me about an update on here so I'm just going to go ahead and run the update by touching the touch screen of the amplify in fact let me bring the camera in close and then I will do it on camera here okay so we are zoomed in here let's go ahead and hit update and update now do one update now we will say yes install and now we're going through the updating process [Music] okay so let's take a quick look through the actual display screen now the display screen looks really really nice this is a super sharp interface 4.7 inch display screen it measures two hundred and seventy four across by twelve sixty eight pixels obviously full color and it is a touchscreen so this first screen here is basically just the device itself we can see how many wired and wireless clients as well as our current throughput which is nothing I did run a speed test earlier and it does crank up the throughput you can see that this changes whenever there's something happening also shows us our date and time if we move to the next screen here's where we can actually run a speed test let's go ahead and run one now and this speed test ended up with three hundred and eight by twenty two point six which is actually a little bit low my internet connection I usually can get about 450 in fact I ran a speed test from my iPhone and I did get much higher speeds than that I got about 450 megabits by 22 down when I ran the speed test from my iPhone okay though let's move on to the next screen here here we have our one IP address as well as our network a router IP address so we can see I have it plugged into just a different land this is 192 168 1.1 36 and then router IP it gave me an odd network which is fine by me because I don't like that everything's always 192 168 1.1 or 1.19 168 0 so the network that it's set up by default is 192 168 160 2 dot X or 162 dot 0 slash 24 and then we can see our port statistics our land port and then the 4 port switch that's on the back this shows us our throughput again I think this is actually total throughput to the device and that's it really not much to the interface itself there are some settings for disabling this interface after hours so if you don't want this to be on all the time you can have it turn on during you know nighttime hours stuff like that so now let's go ahead and flip over so that we can actually see the amplifi application on the iPhone okay so let's take a look at the amplifi app the amplifi app is available for both Android and iOS devices when you log in you basically have your alien on the screen so we're going to tap that that's how you get to your settings the original the main settings page just has settings for like the brightness of the LED and the LCD so like we could turn those both off if we wanted to or we can turn those back up if we want there's also a night mode so if you don't want these lights on during certain hours of the night you can schedule when the LED and LCD are on or off so for instance if it's in your bedroom you don't want this you know bright green thing in your room at night while you're sleeping you can set it that up with the night mode you have WPS protected setup for any WPS devices you can enable that for two minutes at a time if we click on dhcp server this is where we can set up the land subnet for the alien now there is only one land subnet okay so you know someone like me I like to have multiple LAN subnets and VLANs and you know play with all of those settings and fiddle around with the network and firewall rules and all of that you're not gonna get any of that with this amplify and again maybe that's what you want if you just want to keep things super simple then this is great because you just get your one LAN subnet and even your guests go into that same subnet I mean they're likely client isolated being that it's a guest network but they everything's just one big you know Class B Class C scuse me network so we can see the range here is 192 168 if you wanted to change that you can do 10.0 170 216 or 192 168 your subnet is whatever you want it to be in this case by default it was 162 and then my DHCP leases range from 10 to 254 which is what I said I think it was like 100 to 249 by default then you can have your leased time and you can add static leases if you need to there's also port forwarding settings if you do need to poke holes in the firewall you can do so with port forwarding but let's click on general and general allows us 7 the device our time zone the volume for the sort of chimes that it makes you can also locate it if you need to click locate it just starts blinking like crazy if we click on internet here's where we set up our wound settings so we have I haven't set to DHCP right now this is just the when is just plugged into another land that I have here at my network that's why I have 192 168 1.1 36 as the one IP address typically that would be an actual internet IP address from your ISP though it also allows you to set up your DNS settings now there's also universal plug and play which is on by default in this device which I don't like but I understand why they do that because this is sort of marketed towards prosumers towards you know gamers people that want to have fast reliable internet at home especially for you know online gaming and things like that and Xbox and Playstation you got to have UPnP enabled I just personally don't like it because I don't like any services that can poke holes in my firewall without me knowing about it alright it's kind of nice so if you make a change to this device and hit the checkmark proceed it makes a nice little chime so that's pretty satisfying let's go back in and turn UPnP back off chime I like that also an internet we can set up a VLAN ID if we need to we can put this in bridge mode if we are only using the alien for Wi-Fi and we're not using it as a router firewall for the network but that does disable a lot of the functionality of this thing wireless settings this allows you to set up your SSID I set up a main SSID of alien and this kind of does band steering so if you have an 8:02 dot 11 ax device or Wi-Fi 6 device it will just automatically steer you to the 802 dot 11 ax wireless network but you can also come down here and turn on the additional 5 gigahertz radio with a separate SSID and you can also do these other additional SSID so for instance if I specifically wanted a 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi 6 this ID you can enable that and then the SSID shows up as alien - router - 5x and I can choose that SSID from any device that's going to be compatible down here we have our guest network settings again you cannot have a separate guest LAN subnet you everything goes into that one LAN subnet but I'll show you the guest options in a little bit I think they are pretty slick but you know if your again it's really the market for this thing is the home user that just wants a quick easy powerful device you know for their home network this is this is gonna fit that need for someone like me who likes to tinker with the network and set up VLANs and multiple subnets and you know firewall rules and all that sort of stuff this is probably not what I would want right this is what you know I would set up at my dad's house if he was a big online gamer or something like that right you can also set up your country setting band steering router steering and then the under advanced allows you to set the channels for your SS IDs alright so let's go back and let's go back again if we click performance at the bottom this just shows us our speed test history as well as the current throughput of the device which also should be mirrored down here for our megabits per second if we click on guest this is pretty cool so I like this guest functionality because the guest network is not always active by default you can set it so that it's always on but in this case you can set the number of maximum clients that you would like to connect to the guest network and the maximum amount of time that they are allowed to connect so if I was gonna have a party and I was gonna have five friends over I can say all right well I want the guest network to be active with no password they can just connect and you know while they're here for up to five guests for four hours and then we hit start if I had a password I can also hit share and actually share out you know the guest password via text message or email so that's pretty neat so let's go ahead and say stop and then let's click on our devices now for devices this is where you can set up different profiles so for instance I set up this family profile and the family profile has one it's my phone and basically what I've done here is I've set up quiet time meaning that between the hours of 9 p.m. and 7 a.m. my phone will not have internet connectivity ok so if you have kids and you want their devices their tablets their phones to shut off after a certain time and then be re-enabled in the morning this is a really great feature if we click on any of these individual devices such as my i7 computer we can give it different priorities so there's normal priority optimized for streaming or optimized for gaming now I don't know exactly what changes those different settings make for these devices but it is pretty interesting that they had it like if you had a Playstation or an Xbox you'd probably want to set that to optimize for gaming we can also see our client details so here we can see that this computer which is actually connected to the Wi-Fi 6 network this is my I 7 desktop which we're gonna actually go to in a second to do some Wi-Fi 6 speed test we can see I've got a 100% signal I'm in the 5 gigahertz band but it's only 2x2 my mo because the wireless adapter the Wi-Fi 6 adapter that I have in that box is only 2 by 2 my Mo's so the Wi-Fi 6 for the device for the alien is 8x8 mimo right so it can handle simultaneously 4 of my desktops that are have the same 2x2 MIMO wireless access card or a wireless network card in that insight we can see the IP address the MAC address and we could see the throughput or the the receive and transmit bit rate of 1.2 or 1.3 gigabits per second now I have found that the speed test is not quite that high but we'll go take a look at that in a second alright so that's about it for the app again it's a solid app if you're not that into networking and you just want a powerful and easy to use home router with Wi-Fi give you plenty of options for the home user and so it has its specific place in the market and this is very much geared towards home users and gamers especially with this like cool you know green aesthetic and whatnot I mean again it's a cool nice I like the look of it a lot I love the touch screen display I like the color of the LED I mean this is a kind of a showpiece device right people are gonna come into your house and be like whoa what is that thing you know but yeah as far as being able to customize it and do some more advanced networking that's not what you're gonna find in this thing all right so let's go take a look at the interface that you can see through a desktop browser and then let's run some Wi-Fi six speed tests all right so taking a look at my desktop we can see that I have connected over to the IP address of the amplifi itself and basically there's just a few settings in here you don't get nearly the same amount of settings that you get through the amplifi app on your phone we can set up the way an IP address we can enable ipv6 and then we have some advanced settings in here such as bypassing the DNS cache if we want all requests to go straight out to DNS servers we can do that there's a couple of neighbor reports in here so 802 911 K neighbor report 802 10 11 v BSS transition management so this neighbor report says improve access point scan speed and then the 802 11 V says direct stations to a better access point there's also ad blocker so dns-based ad blocker now it's interesting that this is a setting in the interface but there's doesn't appear to be any ad blocker settings in the app at all and there's really no information about it other than it's a check box for DNS ad blocker on or off I'm gonna go ahead and leave it on I'll see if I notice anything then it has some QoS settings so our upload and download speeds we can set in here and then we can turn on enable latency optimization finally down at the bottom we can choose a box that will allow us to receive beta firmware updates if we want to be on sort of the edge firmware of the amplifi okay so enough about all of that let's talk about speed now we can see that I've been running some speed tests here the way that I have this set up is I have a computer with a gigabit NIC land connected to the switch on the back of the amplifi so basically I've got a computer that is a pop OS system and it is running iperf 3 in server mode over on the desktop of that pop OS computer and again plugged directly into the switch of the amplifi over here let me pull up my network settings this is my standard Ethernet connection this is my mainland you can see that the network cable is unplugged I have a couple of other here these are like on my tap adapter and the private Internet access adapter those are all just they're not working none of them I have an onboard Wi-Fi on my motherboard that is also disabled the only network adapter that I have enabled is my Wi-Fi 6 adapter now this is an Intel ax 200 chip based Wi-Fi adapter Wi-Fi 6 adapter and it doesn't really tell me on my computer whether I'm connected using 802 11 ax or not but I am connected to the 802 11 ax SSID so I've specifically connected to that extra SSID that is only for the Wi-Fi 6 devices so all that being said let's go ahead and run some tests I perf over to the system over there and you can see we're getting about 500 megabits per second over to that other system keep in mind that this network adapter you you know the Wi-Fi 6 but stuff of the maximum speed of 8x8 mimo is supposed to be 4.8 gigabits per second ok so first of all I'm maxed out because I don't have a larger than 1 gigabit NIC on the other side right so that maximum that I would be able to get in my testing here I mean really I should have a second Wi-Fi 6 adapter if I was going to do this test properly the maximum that I would be able to get would be like upwards of one gigabit I'm only getting about half that though keep in mind though that this Wi-Fi 6 adapter is 2x2 MIMO so it's only using you know the Wi-Fi six throughput is 8x8 mimo to get that full 4.8 gigabits per second and it's not about single device throughput it's about aggregate throughput so what's the total throughput of all of your devices so if you had a whole bunch of Wi-Fi 6 enabled devices that's the where you would start to see maximum throughput and you would start to see the benefits of Wi-Fi 6 one device doing a speed test is very difficult to get any sort of crazy speeds unless I had an actual 8x8 mimo network adapter wireless adapter in my computer which I don't it's only 2 by 2 so let's run a reverse test as well we're gonna run iperf with that with this client over there in Reverse mode and the reverse we're getting about 440 it looks like about 440 megabits per second yeah so about 440 megabits per second from the server over to this computer on over Wi-Fi 6 and then we've got the just over 500 megabits per second from my computer over to the other system so again not a perfect test I don't actually have it sits on a perfect test just because I don't really have the capacity to test it properly like really what I should have is like 10 Wi-Fi 6 systems all doing you know big speed tests simultaneously and then you would be able to see the aggregate throughput of the device itself and then you'd be able to see like hey what can this thing actually handle in my limited testing capability here you can see that I'm getting about 500 megabits which honestly is not bad it's 500 megabits up and down it's probably I'm probably maxing out the testing devices rather than maxing out the amplify alien itself so take that for what it's worth taking with the greatest all if you guys have any recommendations for how I can better test this device put those down in the comments below and I will be sure to take a look at those and try to implement some of those alternate types of tests as well alright so overall impressions final thoughts on the laughs I a lien I really like this device for home users like said it looks great it's got everything that a home user would need to basically plug it in and be up and running and when I say home user I'm talking about people that don't know anything about networking they just want to plug something in and they want to get on the internet and start you know using their xbox and watching Netflix that type of person is gonna love this device it's it's pricey okay you can get a similar device or a lot cheaper but it's also kind of future proof because you have every type of wireless band available it'll do 802 11 a/b/g/n AC and a X so basically any type of network card or wireless network card that you have will be able to connect to this device and function so that's pretty cool and I think there's definitely a market for this thing again 379 bucks is a little steep but if you go to Best Buy and you look at all of the you know Netgear nighthawk type routers that are out there a lot of those are in that same price range you know they have routers that are up to like 600 bucks off the shelf at Best Buy which I mean frankly I don't know who's spending that kind of money if you have that kind of money I think this is a pretty good choice am I gonna use it myself in my own home environment I am NOT and the reason I'm not is because again I'm a network guy I like to tinker I like to set up VLANs and I like to have full control over network I understand networking right so I want to be able to adjust my networking the way that I want to I don't want to be locked in to a single LAN subnet for both for basically all of my networks the guest network as well as any other SS IDs that I choose to enable but enough about what I think about this amplifi alien who cares what I think about it what do you guys think about the amplifi alien I'd love to hear your thoughts put those down in the comments below if you guys enjoyed this video make sure you give me a thumbs up and if you'd like to see more like this please click subscribe my name is Chris with crosstalk solutions and thank you so much for watching you

Channel: Crosstalk Solutions

Views: 91,147

Keywords: amplifi, amplifi alien, amplifi alien router, amplifi alien setup, amplifi alien router review, amplifi alien mesh, amplifi alien router and mesh point, amplifi alien mesh wifi 6 router, amplifi alien speed test, crosstalk, crosstalk solutions, ubiquiti, ubiquity, wireless router, best mesh wifi 2019, best mesh wifi 2020, best router 2020, mesh router

Id: jeb2wvml3uY

Length: 25min 43sec (1543 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/bickhaus]

Didn’t know about this product, but it looks really nice. At first, I was thinking about recommending this to family and friends, but maybe not. $380 and the website makes it sound like you have to buy more of them, if you want to expand coverage. Why can’t just buy the wall plug APs that come with other Amplifi products? $760 for two APs? Might as well go Unifi at that point. If I am wrong, and there is a cheaper way to expand coverage with the Alien, please let me know.

[u/member_one]

Thanks for this. I'm very torn over this or the udm. Small foot print of 1,250sq ft. Only 5 b devices really need to be hardwired. Cat6 already run throughout the whole place.