QUIT Ubiquiti?! These WAPs are EnGenius! - Part 2

oh there's even more junk on my desk it's the grud match it's the it's the fight to the death unify versus ingenious fight if you haven't seen my other videos about power over ethernet and the future of stuff and i don't know you should check those out i picked up this this is a poe switch this is like a 700 switch i've also got poe devices that i'm working on uh to just experiment with and it's like can the poe standards really be that terrible so this raspberry pi that will is powered over the ethernet line i've deployed a lot of ubiquity gear i've also deployed a lot of ruckus gear and gear from cisco these are typically used in commercial installations things like university campus or or business installation or you know really anything this is just robbery and it always has been um cisco i mean they know what they're doing and they do develop some accelerated silicon and they've done a lot of r d but they're more on the let's own intellectual property side of things then let's innovate at least in wireless networks that's not necessarily true some of their some other actual like backbone products and some of the really expensive stuff to do it's actually really good but if you've ever installed a multi access point network back in the day cisco it was just it was expensive it was a pain and yeah it was better than other stuff that you could buy but it still left a lot to be desired there wasn't anybody that was really trying to innovate to do something amazing and so ubiquity had a lot of early success and they were really good products but you know they were a victim of their own success they branched out into failed products like this ubiquity iphone that runs android great in concept actually pretty decent for an initial execution immediately abandoned because these things didn't have enough phone uh ram or horsepower or anything to manage android updates like it's like they didn't plan on ever updating android really guys come on you could have hired me as a consultant i would have been like what are you doing then there was the ubiquiti ac pro ap ac there's a first and second generation version of this this this is heat discoloration these were not good this was some of the the best wireless ac access points as long as you didn't use them continuously otherwise they would overheat and so campuses and places that have a real high density installation it wasn't good and that was around the time that ubiquity stuff started to get really popular for home installations well you know they're resting on their laurels a bit and maybe they're coming back a little bit i don't know but i've just been a little bit disenfranchised with ubiquity so i was looking around and actually picked ingenius and one of the reasons that i picked ingenius was because of this switch this is two and a half gig on all eight ports plus it's a 240 watt poe switch well this family of switches because this is only an eight port but it's also available in up to 20 ports so 240 watts for the eight ports here and i've got four 10 gig uplink ports on this power ethernet switch i can power my big power hungry devices like ptz cameras i've got a two and a half gig uplink for my really bandwidth hungry wireless access points even my 4x4 solutions ingenius has their own we're gonna take a look at that in another video but uh yeah so i mean you can see i've got a lot of stuff here ubiquity security gateway we're not gonna cover the security gateway stuff on that yet because i couldn't find anything from ingenius that does that and i kind of right now prefer to build my own because i don't think there's anybody that's doing it right as far as that goes and then we've got the you know like the ubiquity this is the uh achd which replaces like these are really old but um this replaces it and it solves a lot of the design flaws but you know you call them for an rma and i just sent you another another dead one so again a little disenfranchised there's also like ubiquiti's home stuff where they're they're branching out again but it's gonna be like this this android phone i'm afraid uh i've just i just really haven't been super enamored with some of the ubiquity stuff like this ubiquity poe switch 24 ports 250 watts it's not bad it's honestly not a bad poe switch poe plus ubiquity doesn't think that you're actually going to use all 24 ports for poe it's just that you can use poe and other regular non-poe devices on this it gives you 24 ports you've got some stacking capabilities and it's pretty solidly built you know it's made of metal definitely heavy enough to really injure somebody should it fall out of the rack the thing to understand with these products is that it's a family of products you have a switch and an access point and other stuff that work together with that like to an extent the power over ethernet stuff because these standards are imperfect like cisco's power over ethernet standard is far out in left field they've reeled that in a little bit it's a little bit less of a headache to work with as an administrator but it's really important to talk about these products in the context of a larger ecosystem of these products and that's one of the reasons why ubiquity did their home stuff so they can do the whole mesh and control more of the equation but i know what you're thinking wait a minute is this a ubiquity review or an ingenious review well you have to understand that i've got a lot of experience with ingenius and they had a software update that they rolled out a few weeks ago and it was absolutely disastrous and i was still smarting from that a little bit i've sort of regained a little bit of clarity and i'm not seeing with rage but that mishap is what led me to try something different and with that let's take a look at the switch configuration so let's talk about device management and configuration ingenius offers on-premise configuration or cloud configuration and really with the switches it's a little bit of a marketing term because the switches do give you a web gui like you can plug it into your network and configure it with a web browser just the way you would expect locally but for the access points the easiest way to deal with it is you just scan the access point with a qr code on your phone and then your phone is going to use its gps system to figure out where that is you can draw that you can use it as a heat map or whatever and then everything is configured you know in the cloud so all of these devices phone home to ingenius and uh believe it or not it's not a virtual machine based solution like this is the other really interesting thing i found out about their uh their stuff it's an api gateway so it's really just a configuration api gateway it's not dependent on say a virtual machine running somewhere else that has configuration software and these devices are smart enough to manage things on their own one of the disappointing things about the unify system was that when roaming from access point to access point the handoff in some firmware versions is very clean and in other firmware versions has been less than clean uh ingenius actually came out with some of the stuff earlier in 2020 and so i've had a few access points here in the lab that i've been experimenting with because it was like i don't know maybe there's something better and in my experience so far the handoff between access points operating in a quasi-mesh-like scenario has been better and frustratingly the ubiquity home stuff has been better than their enterprise grade stuff in terms of i'm gonna have a client and i'm gonna wander you know a laptop or something and i'm gonna wander around the office on a zoom call most of the time it hands off okay sometimes it doesn't hand off okay sometimes i've seen it fail so that uh the access point is sending traffic is the correct access point that's closest to the wireless laptop is sending traffic to the laptop and then when the laptop sends the traffic back to that same access point it just it never goes anywhere it does it intermittently which makes it really difficult to troubleshoot in a three access point setup with the ingenious access points it didn't really do that so anyway so about two weeks ago i picked up this switch this poe switch to go with some of the other equipment that i already had and i reached out to ingenius to ask questions and i talked about this video and some of the projects that i have going on and i mentioned is like hey i'm looking to do a setup and they said we actually have some new firmware and some new stuff coming out that we think you'll like so they sent one of the uh ecw 120 access points as well as the ecw 230. the 230 is a 4x4 solution and the ecw 120 is a 2x2 solution these are commercial grade you don't need these at your house unless there's 50 people living at your house but i'm an insane crazy person and uh you know this is also the office where i am now so i'm gonna experiment with it at the office and then probably take some of it home and then replace some of what is you can you can see on the ceiling it's currently ubiquity that's getting replaced two of my access points the ecw 230 these also have a two and a half gig uplink that's backer compatible with one gig if you're not gonna have a lot of clients you want concentration more than you know it's raw throughput and raw bandwidth one gig is fine but these have two and a half gig uplink and so i'll be using a couple of these with two and a half gig uplinks i've got one computer that's going to plug into this with a two and a half gig it's got a two and a half gig nick in it and then i'm going to use those 10 gig ports on this to get off to the rest of the network which is you know 10 gigabit like the old arista switch or anything like that i can go from sfp plus to copper not a problem i can handle it if two and a half gig is too rich for your blood they've also got this this is the uh ecs one one one two fp so this is one gig it's got two copper one gig uplink ports those are not poe and then it has eight poe plus ports as well this one on the bottom is poe plus plus and this one is poe plus you can watch my introduction video and learn learn more about that even though you might not have any poe plus plus devices if you were going to have a fully populated network it would still be better to get the poe plus plus switch two reasons one is get those 10 gig uplinks even if all eight ports are running at a full gigabit you're not going to saturate that 10 gig uplink whereas this is much less expensive it's one gig across the board if you've got a bunch of devices running you could saturate that one gig uplink if you're just providing wireless for internet access chances are your internet connection is not faster than a gig anyway it doesn't really matter for me testing laptops doing wireless stuff that i shouldn't be doing this that uses a lot of bandwidth got a whole bunch of computers the densities through the roof i need more bandwidth i need more connectivity even though the internet connection is not super fast i still want that backbone connectivity to other devices on the network so it's a little bit of an unusual requirement that i have now whether you're just configuring two or three of these or just 100 you really just you unpack it you scan the qr code with the ingenious application it enrolls the device it asks you a couple of questions you set up your account with the application all that stuff ahead of time and that's pretty much it and you get a really sophisticated interface showing you the number of devices that you have you can drill down into it'll do operating system fingerprinting it'll show you the types of traffic that are being passed so it's like hey we're getting a lot of streaming video or hey we're getting a lot of dropbox and why is dropbox using all the bandwidth what does somebody do in the dropbox that's going to going to chew up all that that bandwidth it couldn't be simpler in the box you get the access point of course it's small and out of the way enough that you can you know mount it on the ceiling or something like that it doesn't come with a bracket so that you're good to go it's got uh some instructions so that you can get to using it really quickly and you get some mounting hardware some nice big anchors for drywall that's it notice there's not even a power adapter in here expected to use power over ethernet now if you don't want to splurge for a power over ethernet switch check out my other video you can get a power over ethernet injector good news bad news the wireless in your home is going to get a lot better good news the bad news or good news depending on how you look at it for how that's going to get better is you're going to have more wireless access points even the newer wireless standards that use a different frequency that frequency has a lot of trouble going through walls but that's that lets you increase the density of access points where you can have one in this room and one in the next room and unlike current you know 802.11g or well it's not really current but like there you get interference and so you have to use different frequencies but if the signal stops at the wall you've got better options and if you've got an old house that's like lath and plaster or metal mesh well wi-fi wasn't working through that anyway you just need to double up on the number of access points you've got so this is a two by two solution it gives you some pretty convenient indicators and mesh indicator two and a half and five gigahertz two and a half gigahertz gives you a little bit better range through those lath and plaster masonry walls versus five gigahertz you get your power and your network indicator one easy quality of life improvement that genius can do for the next round of packaging is print a drill template on the back of the box you get these real simple cardboard box with just printing on one side print a template showing where the screws are on the cardboard box then you can just rip the cardboard box and use that as a template for if you choose to do the installation uh to try to get it as flush as possible with the wall where you're just using the screw the screw mounts like the hidden screen mount things where you can slide it on directly on the ceiling or the wall or whatever that would be easy and it would cost nothing and it would improve the installer's life because they could just use the box as a template some free consulting for you there ingenious it's a lot of work all right so i set up four access points two two thirties two one twenties yeah that's right two four by fours and two two by twos this is covering basically two houses and a uh a workshop and a lot of square footage probably about 6 500 square feet in all so it's a lot of area a couple of families the fit and finish of the access points is pretty good comes with all the installation hardware that you'd need both of them are set up to install on a drop ceiling grid or to mount directly to a ceiling or to mount on like an accessory bracket or something like that so if you have a standard outlet box but with a network cable in it you can pop the face plate off you've got mounting options for mounting to that you can mount directly to the ceiling or masonry with screws or whatever you can mount it directly without anything because both access points have the screw hole mount so you can mount it any which way you want and the only thing that was a little off-putting is that was not a flush mount even when using the accessory bracket and some of the other stuff you don't really get a truly flush mount i think this is actually maybe a good thing because one of the achilles heels with this and the reason this is discovered is because it just doesn't breathe there's no passive airflow circulation and so it overheats and bad things happen so at least with the ingenious access points there is a little bit of accessibility around it um they snap on they don't really have any security features that i could tell like the cisco option you know this this giant metal bracket with this fairly elaborate latching and locking mechanism it does have a plastic retention clip but i think they figure you're going to mount all those access points somewhere that nobody can just you know reach up and walk off with it and because they're cloud managed it would basically be worthless for them to do so because you know the mac address and all this other kind of stuff's like a serial number so it's like stealing an iphone i mean there's no value in stealing an iphone it's basically its own tattletale it doesn't doesn't really make any sense so you know the resale value is it's kind of low so all right fast forward installation four access points two switches uh mostly it was a really good experience installing the software everything went really well the cloud software enrolling the devices everything really worked i even tried enrolling the same device multiple times and it was like whoa you can't you can't do that that's under a different account now it remains to be seen how much social engineering would be necessary to convince ingenious to move a device from one account to another but suffice it to say assuming that that's sufficiently good then stealing equipment or or buying recycled equipment depending on if you want to look at the the pros or the cons of it may be problematic because hey the device is already enrolled somewhere else you can't do anything with it you can't manage it and some of the the devices like the network switch you can actually still manage locally you can log into it locally you can reset the password from the cloud it also has you know the standard serial console and the reset buttons that you'd expect on a switch so you do have a limited ability to manage the switch as an island in your network configuration locally but i'm amazingly good at finding edge cases so there are some really rough edges around this so when i first started set this up it's like okay i got four access points i got overlapping coverage i've got two switches the switches are what power the access points let's see if they took into account the edge cases so the first edge case is i've just got a whole bunch of new devices i've unpacked them all at once i've plugged everything together everything needs a firmware upgrade the cloud is going to manage that automatically this is one of the really great things about any kind of modern management software and you get this from most all vendors in different ways and they're deficient in different ways one of the first ways that i found that the ingenious thing is i think deficient is that it immediately tries updating the firmware on all devices simultaneously can you see what the problem is going to be there you're updating the firmware on the switch the switch has got to reboot the switch powers the access points that are downstream so if they're in the middle of a firmware upgrade they're going to be rebooted in the middle of a firmware upgrade if the switch happens to to beat it that's a race condition and i don't think they take into account that kind of a race condition second there is actually a firmware scheduling thing where you can configure your access points and your switches differently you know they each have their own tab and you can say hey only upgrade the firmware from two to three a.m the problem is that this was not respected so if you look at the event logs you can just see that one of my switches updated its firmware successfully and the other one has just been stuck over and over and over it's tried to update its firmware about a hundred times from the version ending in 29 to the version ending in 36 a second really questionable thing in this uh and this cloud portal thing is the drop down menu where it was by default from my release was on beta and i had to roll back to previous stable to move the firmware version from 36 to 35. i guess there's no available beta or 36 is considered stable when in fact evidently it's not and even the 35 version would not apply cleanly to my switch so i used the cloud interface thing and i just clicked a couple buttons and was like hey this is broken and so this is the other really kind of awesome thing about this setup is that you can just say hey this is broken and they have access to your cloud profile and the logs and stuff and even a tier one technician is gonna look at that log and be like oh man uh yeah that's broken and they'll probably fix it and then i don't have to worry about it as an administrator which is actually kind of an awesome thing considering there's no license fees or subscription or anything to deal with this but like i say i consider my switches to be you know my 10 year infrastructure and my access points to basically be disposable and so far i've had a better experience with the access points being cloud managed and configured and all this kind of stuff then with the switches which are cloud managed i mean you can run it locally you do have that serial console port on all the switches but and you also you know there's a web gui and some other stuff like that but hey what are you gonna do also really clean and intuitive in a ui is setting up the topology and setting up mesh there's a function in here called auto pairing which basically uh has all of your access points to try to talk to one another to figure out sort of where they are you can of course draw a floor plan and physically place your access points on the floor plan and the software will kind of sort of give you a heat map to say okay this is this has coverage this has better coverage but you know for this building it's made out of lath and plaster and brick and chicken wire and the estimations of heat map are completely wrong you basically if you want you know more than a 10 meg connection you're going to need an access point in that room basically i mean the ceilings are 10 ceilings it's it's a faraday cage in here basically so you're going to need an access point in pretty much every room any home that has older construction you might as well just dodge your house with access points and that's you know what i'm trying to do i'm dotting the office with access points with my house in the office same construction uh so yeah i i think that they're gonna have to work on that they're gonna have to work on making the interface obey the firmware restriction update and there's also not an option to just be like just stop just stop trying to update the firmware until support can look at this just stop trying there's no option to do that now to be fair literally all of the solutions that i've been complaining about have these same kind of problems in the beginning ubiquity was very solid and robust but lately the whole reason that i was searching for another vendor is because of exactly those kinds of weird edge cases and flakiness and i've only experienced it in two out of the four devices that i've deployed so far one access point well one out of six devices actually because one access point out of four and one switch out of two that that's it trying to update the firmware again it's just like i just rebooted everything and then so like all the cameras are like i lost power i don't know why i lost power so you know again really annoying and believe it or not this is actually a better experience than you're going to get from some home residential cloud stuff because it's a dumpster fire if everything that you want to do is basically a completely out of the box scenario you're probably not going to have a problem with any kind of home wi-fi set up or at least the ones i've tried which mostly ubiquity and a little bit an early version of the google one and i'm not super comfortable with google doing stuff because i can see a lot of traffic leaving the network which is a little disturbing and i can't say that i've really seen that doing tcp dumps from ubiquity or ingenious or anybody else but i will say that this headache is precisely the reason why i'm looking for something else like this is the grass greener on the other side the jury's still out probably gonna do a follow-up video in a couple of months just to say how it went see how it goes overall the installation process fit and finish some of the other stuff i like it a lot better so far i like the cloud interface a lot better the management interface i should say because it's a little bit cloud and a little bit not um and the the control and the flexibility that i have i have the option to log to a syslog server so i can spin up my own syslog server and actually send events there the switch supports that right out of the box i can configure it it's a local server i mean it could be an internet server too but i wouldn't want to do that for security reasons and so i really like the the flexibility and control it gives me an interface i can see the traffic i can do you know captive portal splash page i can do client by client restriction i can even do radius logins we can spool up a radius server out in the cloud and so this is all you know pretty standard features but if you've been under the loop or you've always sort of diy'd your solution some of these things are a little uh maybe a little fancier for your experience than others but ingenious is going to have to work on those rough edges and take into account those bizarro edge cases i had initially planned to do the grudge match with performance and installation comparison all in the same video but i'm going to move the performance comparison to another video and player 3 has entered the game cisco meraki now i will give you a preview though so the performance of the ingenious devices is top shelf it is absolutely top tier the 2x2 the 120 that's a that's a wi-fi 5 implementation the 4x4 is a wi-fi 6. i can manage almost a gigabit from a wireless device that's the good news the bad news is that's an iphone 11. the fastest wi-fi six device i have is an iphone 11 which is for you know development purposes fortunately the second fastest device i have is not an iphone 11 but you're gonna have to wait for the performance comparison video because it's not quite as cut and dried as it seems but i promised and the performance of these access points the hardware is on top it beats ubiquity it beats cisco meraki those are the devices that i had available to test so uh kind of mind-blowing i knew that before i got started which is why i went on this whole journey and it has been several weeks in the making but i thought i would share that you're gonna have to stay tuned it may already be up on patreon uh probably out in a week or two ish give or take for the full performance comparison using mobile clients and a couple of desktop solutions with wi-fi six those are the the two antenna solutions with wi-fi six in terms of like congested scenarios i can't really test a congested scenario easily but uh there will be uh several surface devices with older ac wi-fi plus some newer wi-fi six devices we'll see how that shakes out so look for that performance comparison overall i'm pretty happy you know sort of calmed down a bit now that the fallout from that ubiquity update that did not go well or sort of uh behind me a little bit they've really got to work on that but uh i am impressed with what ingenius offers they're not at feature parity in all seriousness they're not a feature parody with ubiquity yet but as many features as they have with the simplicity of their interface and maybe even one upping the whole cloud key versus a vm there's some pros and cons there we'll talk about that but uh i'm really impressed with this product and the offering and sort of the ecosystem and and what you can get in the way of poe with one or ten gig uplinks depending on what your preference is uh it's it's about time that we got some 2.5 gig devices and 2.5 gig plus poe that's pretty awesome so i'm wendell this is level one i'm signing out and i'll see you later

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 199,317

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: 4G2g7Txgzgw

Length: 26min 8sec (1568 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/EtherBest]

I too have installed tons of ubiquity and have some at home. I share the same feelings, feels like they're losing their north star

[u/briankfree]

This video really hit home to me as well. Like I've been faithful to Ubiquiti for a long time but I feel like I'm just being drug along. I'm constantly having to do firmware upgrades to fix bugs and I feel like some of the basic features I want are missing (but are available in some consumer Wifi Routers). For those using these EnGenius APs, what router/gateways are you using?