This is the AltaLabs A6 Pro, a 4x4 dual-band enterprise access point that claims to outperform comparable ubiquity access points. Now, that is a bold claim from a company that just released its first access points to the market this year. So, does it live up to the hype? In this video, we're gonna dive deep into the A6 Pro, we'll take a look at the configuration, the setup, and I'm gonna do my best to put it through its paces against the access points that we all know and love to find out if this is indeed the Ubiquiti Killer. I am proud to introduce Rogue Support, your one-stop shop for all of your networking and wireless needs. Whether you're a home user or small business, our expert Rogue technicians are standing by to provide tailored support, no matter the mix of equipment or the technical challenges that you face. Now, we recently had a customer open a ticket who had 38 access points in a warehouse and they were experiencing dropouts and signal issues on their devices. This was the perfect opportunity to use Rogue Support to help fine-tune and optimize the performance of their wireless coverage to ensure smooth sailing for all of their devices. So, visit Rogue Support on the web at rogue.support and be sure to tell your friends, family, and co-workers about this new service when you hear them complaining about their network woes. First things first, let's talk about the specs of this new access point and we're gonna get it out of the box. Now, Ulta Labs has initially released two different access point models, the AP6 and the AP6 Pro. Both of these access points are Wi-Fi 6, 4096 QAM, and PoE Plus powered. The differences are that the AP6 is 2x2 MIMO in both the 2.4 and 5 GHz spectrums, whereas the A6 Pro is 2x2 MIMO in the 2.4 GHz, but 4x4 MIMO in the 5 GHz range. This AP6 Pro is also IP54 weatherproof, whereas the non-Pro version is meant to be indoors only. Now, for data rates, the AP6 is rated for up to 2.4 Gbps, and the AP6 Pro is rated for up to 5.8 Gbps of total throughput. Alright, so let's get this thing out of the box. I will say right off the bat, the packaging and the look of the device itself is pretty sexy. Now, this is something that I've complained about with some other vendors, like TP-Link and Ingenious, Cambium Networks even, they put out these access points and they're fine, they work great, but they're just not like sexy products that everyone wants, you know what I mean? Ubiquiti products are sexy, Ulta Labs access point is very sexy in my opinion. Let's take a look at this thing. Different form factor as far as the design goes, right? This is kind of like a pill-shaped form factor, looks like a big Tylenol. We've got the Ulta logo right on the side here, and then on the back, we have one Ethernet port for PoE power in, and then we have another Ulta logo as the heatsink, or sort of incorporated into the heatsink, all metal on the back of this device. There is also a reset button and not a little paperclip reset hole, which I guess is a double-edged sword, right? Because this is easier to press, but the point of having a paperclip hole is that it's not easy to press, right? But imagine that this is up on a wall, you're not gonna be, you know, hitting that button in the back anyways. You'd have to actually take it off in order to accidentally press the reset button. Okay, so let's see what else is in the box here. Looks like we have a quick start guide, we have a mounting bracket, and some mounting screws. And that looks to be about it. Okay, so the next step here is to get this thing configured. I have not actually seen the interface for this yet myself, so I will learn it, I will take all of the knowledge and inject it right into my brain so that I can give you guys an informed opinion about at least the configuration of this device. And then later on we're going to test it up against some comparable access points to see if the performance claims are actually legit. We're gonna get to the speed test results of this Ulta AP6 Pro very soon, but let's first take a quick tour through the cloud dashboard. And that's the first thing that you should know about these Ulta devices. This is not gonna make everyone happy, but it is a cloud interface only. There is no local installation option for the dashboard that I'm about to show you. Alright, future Chris breaking in here. I am in the process of editing this very video, and when I got to this part I'm like, you know, I know my audience, and my audience is not gonna like the fact that there is not a locally installable dashboard option for the Ulta access point. So I emailed Ulta about it to see what their official stance is. And within an hour their CEO Chase Harrison wrote me back, and he forwarded me a statement from their CTO Jeff Hansen, and this is their official statement on the lack of a locally installable dashboard. Quote, That being said, while we feel most customers will be well served by our cloud, we have mentioned already that we are working on an on-premises solution for those that demand it. However, as we have done with our access point and switch products, we do not want to release it prematurely. We believe that our customers deserve an on-premises solution that works as well as our cloud. So there you have it. No ETA yet, but they do actually have an on-premises locally installable GUI for the Ulta access points on the roadmap. So hopefully that helps to quell some of the dissenters. And yeah, let's get back to the video. So this is the cloud dashboard. The first thing I want to talk about is adoption of these devices. Adoption is actually really, really easy. In fact, I have one more AP6 Pro. Let's go ahead and pull it out of the box and then we will start the adoption process while I'm talking about it. And you guys can see exactly how it works. OK, so the first device I adopted with the mobile app and then subsequent devices, I just plug them into the network and they show up in the dashboard. So let's do that next. OK, the device is plugged in now while we're waiting for that. Notice our dashboard here. So the first thing that you're going to see is real time activity. Now, this is one thing that I really, really love about this Ulta dashboard is that at a glance you get a lot of information. So I can see real time network activity. I can see the top active devices, for instance, my G4 Doorbell Pro, which is a wireless camera, right? It's always transmitting between like two and four megabits worth of data. So it makes sense that it's kind of up towards the top of that list. You can also see top active applications. Now, notice that this is the exact same graph as my G4 Doorbell Pro because it is identifying that camera traffic as FTP data for some reason. And then we can see each of the various access points. And of course, if you hover over, you can get the sort of real time view of exactly what's happening on a per access point, per application or per device level. So going across the top here, the first thing we have is network. And I click on network and now notice just, you know, less than a minute later after I plugged in this new access point, it is sitting here and available for adoption. So we're just going to say set up and that's it. It is now adopting. So once it's adopted, there's a little bit more that we have to do. But let's keep moving for now. These are my two access points. Now, if we click on the actual access point, we can see some of the settings. So right here, we could see the channel. You could set your channels manually. You could set your channel width manually. We have colors here, which we're going to talk about in just a moment. And then if we click advanced, we can set the antenna gain. Right now, I have everything set to auto. I like to test this stuff as auto settings just to see how well it performs right out of the box without any tweaking or fine tuning. If we click on settings, we can set an IP address manually or with DHCP. We can say which VLAN this particular access point is managed on. We could set a fallback upon failure to a different network. And then we have some LED control. We can move it in between sites. This cloud interface is a multi site interface. And then this always on setting says it enables enabling this will keep Wi-Fi broadcasting from the access point, even if the Internet goes down. Now, interestingly, this setting is off by default. So basically, if it loses Internet connectivity, it stops broadcasting the SSID of the access point. I don't think that should be the default. I think it should continue to broadcast the SSID, even if the Internet goes down. So I set mine to yes. And then we can click scan and do a quick scan of the, you know, the networks that this particular access point sees. And it will show us basically how crowded the various spectrums are around us. Now, that quick scan does not require the access point to go offline or lose connectivity for your devices whatsoever. I believe the full scan does, but the quick scan does not. And so then we can see what other access points around us are very noisy and we can hover over and sort of see how crowded our spectrums are in both the two and five gigahertz. Two point four and five gigahertz. Excuse me. OK, so this access point is now available. We're going to click on it and give it a name. I'm going to call this AP6 Pro 3. And interestingly, it has an IP address in my IoT network. So the network port that I plugged it into must be on that IoT network. So we'll have to change that. But it's OK. It actually worked anyways. So we're going to now update the device by clicking this little up icon right here to go from 1.0 M to 1.0 X. And we have the option if we want to update it right now or do we want to schedule it for tonight? So we'll just say right now. And that update is happening now. One of the things that I do really love about these devices is they are very, very responsive. So when you're adopting them, when you're updating them, when you're making changes, everything happens very quickly. And even the reboot of the device happens very, very quickly. I absolutely love that. OK, so it looks like it's downloaded and installed the update. And then I just have this checkmark to reboot the device. So let's do that now. And then after the reboot, this access point is now fully adopted. It's just that easy. Now, let's talk about these colors a little bit. So the colors are essentially ways that we can group our network. So if I come over here to settings and we can see the various Wi-Fi networks, I have assigned a different color to each of these Wi-Fi networks. Now, also notice that this is showing me networks across all of my sites. I have two different sites, one that I called Crosstalk Office and one that I called Sherwood Home. If you are managing multiple sites, you can utilize the same network. So the same SSID and password, et cetera, across multiple of your sites without having to recreate those networks on a per site basis. Or you can check this box to cut everything down to just the networks that are available in the current site that you're working on. So since I've assigned the colors, which again are just a way to group networks and access points, I've set a green color on my IoT network and a blue color on the Sherwood Forest network. If I come back here over to my devices and I click into this AP6 Pro 3 that we just adopted, I can add blue and I can add green and hit save. And now that new access point is automatically part of those networks. All right, going back to settings, let's click on a Wi-Fi. So here we can see, for instance, my IoT network and here we have our Wi-Fi security settings. Now, they did something really interesting with the SSIDs that I have not seen any other vendor do. And that is that with any single SSID, so here's my SSID right here. Within this SSID, you can set up multiple passwords. And depending on the password that the client device uses to connect to that particular wireless network, you can assign that client device different settings. Okay, so if you look right here, this dropdown next to this password says we've got a standard network, a large network, an IoT network, internet only network, a guest network. We can also set the specific VLAN that that password makes this client device a member of, as well as throttle the bandwidth and do some other things like bypassing the hotspot or ignoring any of the filters that you've set up for things like blocking social media or whatever you wanna happen to block. We'll see that in just a second. So if I add a password and I say, well, this one's gonna be a guest password or a guest network password, even though it's the same subnet, you don't have to put a different VLAN, you can apply different sort of access control rules to the clients that connecting with that specific password on this SSID that are different from clients that connect with a different password on the same SSID. Hopefully that makes sense. And if we click show more next to passwords, you get a brief explanation of what each of the different settings does. So for instance, large network is optimized for hundreds to thousands of wifi devices. IoT network is restricted to internet access and local incoming connections only. Internet only of course is internet only. And then guests have access to the internet and IoT devices only. But for instance, they wouldn't be able to interact with any device that's in the standard or large network setting. Then if we scroll down, we can pick which sites this particular SSID is a member of. Imagine if you were the manager for a bunch of restaurants and you wanted to have the same SSID and password across all of your restaurants, you would basically set up the SSID and password or passwords and then you would assign that SSID to all of your various sites, restaurant one, restaurant two, restaurant three, restaurant four. And then if you make a change to the password for instance, that change is now replicated across all of those restaurants without having to go into each site individually. And then I've also added this green color group and you can see there are a bunch of different colors that you can choose from to just sort of help group everything together. If we click advanced settings, we can see the VLAN that this particular SSID pertains to by default. And we have some options for our actual wireless bands. So do we want 2.4 gigahertz only or 5 gigahertz only or both? Do we want to enable fast roaming? We can set throttling for the entire SSID. We can set a schedule. We can turn on a hotspot, captive portal if we want to do that. And then of course we can save everything down at the bottom. All right, if we click on devices up at the top, we can see all of our various devices. I have it sorted by traffic. And again, this is very, very real time. As soon as the device pops on the network, it shows up in this interface immediately. If I do something like run a speed test, so for instance from my phone, if I run a speed test, go, we should see my phone pop up to the top of this list almost immediately. So speed test is running and there we go. So we see no name and we can see 780 megabits per second as this speed test is running. Now for each of these devices that are on your network, you can click on them and rename them. Like I can say iPhone 13 right here. And if you click on the little icon, you have some options here. So the network type, what VLAN is this particular device supposed to be a member of? You can throttle the device individually. You can bypass the filtering, the hotspot, the schedule, and you can set the device icon. So for instance, I can set it to the Apple icon since it's an iPhone and hit save. All right, back over in settings now. We already talked about our wifi settings. Under system, we can change the default LED color of the access points. We can change our time zone and a couple of other miscellaneous things. If we click on users, that basically just allows us to add additional admins to this site. And then if we click on filter, we have the option of filtering out either applications or groups of applications. So for instance, I can filter TikTok right there, or I can filter out, it's hard to see because in dark mode, but there's social right there and I can say social networks and then save that. And then that filter is applied to the entire SSID. Now, interestingly, if you have a single SSID, but you're using two different passwords for two different networks. So for instance, SSID main, and then you've got within main, your normal users and guest users, right? If you've set up that sort of access control list, like I showed you a moment ago, this filtering, you cannot apply that to just one of the passwords. It applies to the entire SSID. So if you wanted to have one SSID or one group of users that's filtered and one group of users that's not filtered, you would have to create two separate SSIDs to do that. Okay, so there we have it going back to the dashboard. Now, keep in mind that at this time, Ulta does not have any other types of devices. They are going to be coming out with some switches and they do not have any sort of router firewall. I don't know if they're going to be coming out with something like that in the future, but for now, this dashboard interface is really just for managing and applying settings to the access points only. All right, let's move on to my access point testing. And I should say right up front that Ulta did send me these access points for free. I did not pay for these with my own money, but there's no compensation other than that. So all of my opinions and testing and everything are completely on my own. They have no approval over any of this stuff, right? So let's jump right into it. Now, what I wanted to do for the testing was compare the Ulta A6 Pro to the comparable Ubiquiti access point, which would be the U6 Pro. Okay, so both of these access points are two by two MIMO in the 2.4 gigahertz and four by four MIMO in the five gigahertz spectrum. The differences you can see on the screen here, MSRP on the AP6 Pro is $179. On the U6 Pro, it's $159. So these Ulta access points are about $20 more expensive. And you can see the throughput here, a little bit higher rated throughput on the AP6 Pro, but a little bit lower antenna gain on the AP6 Pro as well. And both of these devices, the U6 Pro as well as the AP6 Pro are IP54 weather rated, meaning that they're okay to be outside. Though, honestly, I would probably have them under the eve of a roof or something like that. So the way that I tested the speed for these devices is I have open speed test running in a Docker container on my Synology NAS. That Synology NAS is plugged into a 24 port switch. And then each access point was individually also plugged into that same 24 port switch. And I only had a single access point on for the test. That's for both Ubiquiti and Ulta. And I turned off every other access point that I have control over. So this was the only access point that I have control over actually broadcasting when I ran these tests. And here are my test results. Okay, so the way that I did this is I ran speed tests locally on the LAN because the speeds that I would get out of this device are greater than that of my internet connection. So I had to run a local LAN speed test over to that open speed test Docker container. And what I ran was four different speed tests to each access point. One from my desktop PC, the one that I'm using right here. One from my iPhone 13. One from my Samsung laptop. And one from an iPad. On this graph, the blue and red are the Ulta download and upload. And the yellow and green are the Ubiquiti download and upload. And then they're grouped by my desktop PC, iPhone, laptop, and tablet. For the desktop PC as well as the laptop, desktop PC is Windows 10, laptop is Windows 11. All of these are Wi-Fi 6 devices. The speeds were comparable. Okay, so you can see upload and download speed for Ulta and Ubiquiti were about the same across both of those devices. And of course, if you ran more speed tests, you could get, you know, greater or lesser numbers, but they're basically on par with each other. What I saw for the Apple devices though, both the iPhone as well as the tablet, is that the upload speed was slower for both Ulta and Ubiquiti, but Ubiquiti's upload speed was significantly slower for some reason. Again, I don't know if that's just some sort of compatibility issue with Apple devices and Ubiquiti. I have heard about that type of stuff in the past, but these are the results that I got, right? So basically on par as far as downloading across both the devices. And then for Ulta, the download, the upload speed was slower, but not quite as drastically slower as it was with the Ubiquiti access point. So all of these speed tests, I then ran a second time, and here's the second results. And you can see between the first and the second, they're almost identical, right? So on par for speeds across the board for the desktop PC and the laptop, and then the iPhone or the Apple devices, the iPhone and the tablet, the upload speed on Ubiquiti was significantly slower than the download speed. So for all of these tests, the Ulta access point was left as essentially factory defaults in terms of setting auto channel, auto output power, and auto channel width. Okay, so the channel width on the Ulta by default is 80 megahertz. Channel width is how much of the spectrum are you taking up or how much bandwidth can the access point eat up. Now for the Ubiquiti access point, I did have to change the channel width because the Ubiquiti access point channel width in the 5 gigahertz by default is 40 megahertz versus the default 80 megahertz for the Ulta. So I did have to bump up the Ubiquiti to 80 megahertz. Otherwise, everything was left default on both of these devices. I also did some pretty significant range testing with these access points. That involved me taking each access point individually. I put them sort of centrally located in the middle of my house up on a Wi-Fi stand and I put it right up on the roof so it was basically first floor and central to the house. And then I used an application called NetSpot on my laptop and I walked around in a circuit and took measurements and then created a wireless heat map to show me the differences between the two devices. Now when I created those heat maps, I did it with a Google Maps overview of my house which I am not going to put on the internet so you'll just have to take my word for the fact that the range for both of these devices was almost identical with actually the Ulta access point just edging out the Ubiquiti access point a little bit. Like you could tell where the green areas of Wi-Fi coverage were. The Ulta access point just had a little bit more green coverage than the Ubiquiti one did. But they were similar enough that it probably wouldn't even be noticeable as a user. So then here's the million dollar question. Is the Ulta AP6 Pro, in fact, the Ubiquiti Killer? And I'm going to say that overall it definitely has a lot of potential but it's probably too early to tell. And like anything, there are pros and cons. So let's start with the positives. In my testing, the Ulta and the Ubiquiti access points were basically on par with each other with the Ulta just edging out Ubiquiti in both range and speed which is pretty impressive for Ulta's first generation access point right out of the gate versus Ubiquiti who's well established in many generations ahead. The Ulta dashboard feels fresh and polished and I do absolutely love what they've done with the real-time statistics. It's probably one of my favorite features of the Ulta interface. Being able to see at a glance the amount of bandwidth flowing in and out of every access point and every device is a huge advantage when it comes to network troubleshooting. I also love the speed and responsiveness of the hardware. So from adoption to booting, rebooting, firmware changes, settings changes, everything about these Ulta devices is super, super fast. Software-wise, I like that Ulta is trying to be innovative in their configuration. So being able to have a single SSID with multiple different passwords for different configurations is pretty cool. And using the colors for grouping access points and SSIDs is interesting though it does feel a little bit half-baked. I'm kind of curious to see where they end up with that feature. Price-wise, I think they're fine. They're on par with similar devices. Looks-wise, I definitely think they're sexy. All in all, these are great little access points, right? Super easy to set up and out of the box they work perfectly fine. Now let's talk about the cons. The first and most obvious con is that these are cloud managed devices only. Now I'm personally not a guy who mines the cloud, right? I use a ton of different cloud-based applications. My business is very cloud-based and bandwidth isn't an issue for me, right? Having that real-time dashboard, these devices use more internet bandwidth sending data to and from the cloud than, you know, an access point that might have a local controller. But I recognize that not having a local controller is going to be a problem. It's going to be a non-starter for a ton of people that are watching this video. Another downside is that as of today, Alta only has access points, right? They've got some switches that are coming soon. You can see those on the website and perhaps we're going to see some routers or firewalls in the future. But you don't get that single pane of glass that combines everything into one interface. If you're already standardized on Ubiquiti and then you decide to switch out all your access points to Alta, you now have two different interfaces for managing your network. And I, you know, I didn't really do any testing when it comes to, like, interoperability between all the UniFi stuff and these Alta access points. I mean, it works fine in my network, but I didn't test that extensively. Evaluating the device physically, the AP6 Pros do run pretty hot. Let's take a quick temperature reading with the one that I've got in my hand here. And it looks like this one is reading about, I don't know if you can see that, but about 112 or 113 degrees Fahrenheit. This one over here, however, is 124.5 degrees Fahrenheit. So I've, in measuring these, you know, you touch them and you're like, ooh, that's hot. I took some temperature readings. The highest that I saw was 128 degrees Fahrenheit on the heat sink on the back of the Alta access point, which is about 53 degrees Celsius for my international friends. To be fair, that is only a few degrees warmer than the U6 in-wall access point. I had to actually remove this one as part of my testing. It also has a metal back, and when I removed it, it was super hot. I took a temperature reading, it was about 125 degrees Fahrenheit. So about the same temperature as these Altas. I'm also not a huge fan of the mounting bracket. It was difficult to work with just getting it onto that Wi-Fi stand. I also think that any device that is capable of six plus gigabits of total throughput should not have a gigabit NIC. All right, my speed tests were touching 900 megabits per second with an 80 megahertz channel width. If I bumped up the channel width to 160 megahertz, which is the maximum, I would immediately bottleneck on the gigabit NIC. So why they don't just put 2.5 gigabit NICs on these, like, super high-end Wi-Fi 6 access points by default, I mean, who knows? So let's talk about the software a little bit. I do think that the software interface has a long way to go before it's fully polished. I definitely ran into some strange issues when I was working with the product. Now, some of these issues were pretty simple, such as the responsiveness of the mobile app when zoomed in. I mean, look, I'm a guy in his mid-40s. I've been working with computers my whole life. My eyes are not the best, all right? So on my phone, I've got the font sizes increased to like 135%, and when you do that, sort of words get jumbled around on the mobile app, right? They really haven't programmed that app yet for, like, responsive scaling. I also ran into some weirdness when I was programming the access points. So, for example, I tried manually setting one of the access points to a specific channel in the 5 gigahertz range, and when I did that, the 5 gigahertz connectivity disappeared completely. My devices would then only connect on 2.4 gigahertz. So then I disabled 2.4 gigahertz, hoping to, you know, force stuff to 5 gigahertz, and then the SSID stopped broadcasting entirely, right? I had to put 5 gigahertz back onto auto settings in order to restore that connectivity. So, again, I don't know if that was just an anomaly. I didn't do a ton of testing with it, but I did notice a little bit of sort of like QA weirdness in the software. Basically, it boils down to that their interface still feels pretty beta. But to come to Alta's defense a bit, ask yourself this. Would you rather have great hardware with software that needs some improvement or a really great software interface on mediocre hardware? Personally, I'm really glad that the hardware is performing well. The software can and likely will improve over time. Here's the major takeaway from this entire video, and I want to be super clear about this. I am personally impressed enough with the Alta access points that I'm going to replace all of my Ubiquiti access points here in my home. Now, my Wi-Fi needs are pretty vanilla, and in my testing, I didn't run into any showstoppers as far as networks or IoT devices. When I replicated my SSIDs onto the Alta equipment, all of my devices connected up without issue. Everything's been working perfectly fine. And since the performance of the Alta access point is on par with Ubiquiti, really it just comes down now to see how their wireless behaves in production over time. Is it going to hold up with this level of performance? And also, how quickly is Alta coming out with meaningful updates to their software and firmware? But I urge everyone watching this video, don't take my word for it, right? If you have the capability to test these out for yourself, please do so. Like if you're an MSP or an installer who primarily installs Ubiquiti access points for your customers, try out these Altas and then send me the results of your testing. I would absolutely love to see more real-world test results. All right, links down below for everything, and make sure to check out Rogue Support at rogue.support for all of your network and wireless support needs. And if you'd like to keep this party going, I have hand selected a couple of videos on the right here for you to watch next. The top video is the start of my new Home Networking 101 series, which is a beginner's guide to everything that you need to know to dial in your own home network. And the bottom video is my recent review of the UniFi Dreamwall.
