U6-LR Review and Benchmarks

welcome to crosstalk solutions my name's chris and today we're taking a look at the brand new u6 lr from ubiquity inc this is the second wi-fi six access point released from ubiquity this u6 lr has a price tag of 179 msrp now unlike the u6 lite the first wi-fi 6 access point that came out from ubiquity this one is a 4x4 multi-user mimo with ofdma access point that means that this one is a lot beefier and we're going to do some benchmark testings on this access point a little bit later in the video so make sure you stay tuned for that let's first talk a little bit about the specifications of this device however the u6 lr features a dual core cortex a53 cpu running at 1.35 gigahertz and it's got 512 meg of ram this device also has a single gigabit ethernet port down here in the back uh there's also a reset hole and that's it so you got your little reset switch you got your gigabit ethernet port and that's all there is to this device notice however that it has this sort of rubberized piece that fits into the ethernet compartment that is because this device is ip54 weatherproof ip54 weatherproof essentially means and i quote a product with an ip54 rating is protected against quantity of dust that could interfere with the normal operation of the product but is not fully dust type that's the five of the ip54 the product is completely protected against solid objects it is also protected against water splashing from any angle what this means in a nutshell is that this device is an indoor access point but it can be placed semi-outdoors is actually what ubiquity says so semi-outdoors means you can put it outdoors but you'd want to have it up under like the eave of a roof or something like that a little bit protected where you don't want rain hitting this device directly but if it gets splashed with some water from any of the angles it's probably going to be just fine and that's why they have this little you know rubberized grommet sort of piece that fits back here and covers up these uh back end components covers up and protects the ethernet port the u6 lr also comes with a pretty robust mount let me pull that out here i've got it actually on this piece of wood but this is almost essentially i'm not sure if it's the exact pro mount but this looks very similar to the ubiquiti pro mount that you used to be able to buy separately in fact i actually have one of those pro mounts i should have pulled it out before this video to see if this is the exact pro mount but you can see it's got a whole bunch of different hole screw holes and instructions for different types of mounting including wall mount t-bar mount whole bunch of different junction box mounts as well as a european outlet box so a little bit of a departure from the mounts that typically come with the ubiquiti access points this one is not plastic it's steel and it just seems a little bit more robust now let's talk about power and output of this lr access point it is significantly more powerful than the u6 light by that i mean the max transmit power of this device is 26 dbm in both the 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz spectrum as far as the antenna gain for the antennas inside the device it's 4 dbi in the 2.4 gigahertz and 5.5 dbi in the 5 gigahertz compared to the u6 light so the u6 light is 2.8 dbi into 2.4 instead of 4 dbi with this one and in the 5 gigahertz spectrum the u6 light is 3dbi versus the u6 lr's 5.5 dbi so almost twice as much antenna gain out of the u6 lr the throughput of this device is basically the same as all of these devices it's the theoretical maximum which is 600 megabits per second in the 2.4 gigahertz range and 2.4 gigabits per second in the five gigahertz range where you're going to see an advantage of this type of access point of course you get the added benefits of wi-fi six which is which has features for more dense environments right so if you just have this at home with like 10 clients you're not going to see a ton of improvement but you if you have this in an assembly hall or something like that where you've got multi-hundreds of people connecting to a single access point that's what the 4x4 multi-user mimo and ofdma is actually four it actually says 300 plus concurrent clients for the u6 lr but of course that's also sort of the theoretical maximum in a perfect environment chances are you would never actually want to plan for 300 clients connecting to one access point you would want to supplement that with you know multiple access points for a deployment if for nothing else just for redundancy because one access point going down with 300 clients connected to it wouldn't be a good day for an i.t administrator the operating temperatures of this device are minus 30 to 60 degrees celsius which is minus 22 to 140 degrees fahrenheit and this is capable of the new wpa3 security standard i have not tested that out yet the wpa3 stuff just came out with the latest release of unifi network version 6.1.61 so i hope to be doing some additional wpa3 testing in the very near future now since this has more antenna gain and it's a 4x4 multi-user mimo it is significantly larger than the nano hd or the u6 light form factor so this is the nano hd but it's the same four fat form factor as the u6 light let me put these side by side so you can get a clear picture here you can see that the u6 lr is significantly bigger and it's even a little bit bigger than the uap ac pro i have one of those let me go grab it real quick all right so here is the uap ac pro and you can now see a size comparison of all three of these devices uh right next to each other so there we go definitely kind of like a small medium large uh size devices okay let's get on to the benchmark testing as far as the testing methodology goes i use the same testing methodology that i've been using for all of these access points that i've been benchmarking i'll put a link on the screen for the ingenious versus ubiquity video that i recently did where i went into the testing methodology in more detail basically though i am running unify network 6.1.61 this is running on a udm pro and the only thing the only setting that i changed for this device i left everything default except for the channel width and the channel width i set to 160 megahertz this is the first ubiquity access point that i'm aware of that can do 160 megahertz channel width so right there it's gonna have a bandwidth advantage over any of the other access points the u6 light for instance can do a maximum of 80 megahertz channel width and that's what i use to test the u6 light so 4x4 multi-user mimo with 160 megahertz channel with hopefully we will see some interesting results and definitely interesting results we did see uh this is pretty anecdotal not very scientific but on my ipad which is connected with 802.11 ax i was able to get 706 megabits down and 554 megabits up all right and since i've got the ipad connected and sitting right next to this access point let's go ahead and run that speed test again and this time we ended up with 641 download and 520.9 upload all right so we have a little bit more scientific ways of testing not entirely scientific but a little bit more scientific ways of testing so let's pop over to my laptop here and we're going to take a look at these benchmark results here i am in unify i did want to show you one thing so if i click on the u6 lr then we click on radio we can see here the 5 gigahertz radio is set to a 160 megahertz channel width yeah that's awesome now the 2.4 gigahertz i left where it was at 20. i didn't really do any 2.4 gigahertz testing all of my clients are 802.11 ax clients everything else in here i left completely default i did not even try out the wpa3 stuff yet okay so on to the testing here we have my iperf testing this is where i run six different iperf commands i run those commands multiple times and i take the average of all of the of each command on four different wi-fi six clients connecting through the u6 lr and i am testing the server side of iperf is a 10 gigabit connected truenas box so there's going to be no issues with the bandwidth of you know doing the speed test to the server so here we can see some of the clients uh the averages here 700 megabits that's an interesting one because in my testing a couple things that i noticed about this u6lr number one the test results were shockingly consistent so when you would run an iperf test there was usually you know if you run the iperf test three times in a row there was usually less than about a 10 megabit variation between the three tests so these averages there wasn't really much to average it was almost the same exact results from every test that i ran so for instance uh wi-fi 6.1 which is an old-school ubuntu 20.04 machine i think it's like an amd processor something or other 800 megabits it got 800 megabits average across three different uh iperf tests uh 527 831 you can see the the test results here up to the maximum we got was about 924 megabits now we average all of those scores and this old ubuntu 2004 desktop ended up with a 737 megabit average and this is really interesting the other thing that i noticed about these tests besides the consistency of the u6lr itself was that for iperf testing it seemed like the ubuntu machines did a lot better than the open speed test testing where windows machines excelled in the open speed test testing so i guess i'm glad that we're doing multiple different kinds of tests here because i'm getting different results the windows machines did not do as well in the iperf testing but did better in the open speed test testing so here we go so average my second ubuntu box got a 476 megabit average that is the box that is up in my attic it's going through like two walls as well as insulation in the attic and all that sort of stuff still pulled down an impressive 476 megabits average my desktop my windows 10 desktop here in the same room as the access point ended up with a 524 megabit per second average and then my windows 10 desktop that i've got located through in the next room through a wall ended up with 346 megabits average we average all of those scores together and our distilled average was 520 megabits across all of the different test clients just a quick interruption here while i was editing this video i realized that i didn't talk about something that i probably should have and that is that when we're getting speed test results like i've been showing here we're talking high 800 megabits in our open speed test results and up to 924 megabits that was the maximum that i received in my iperf testing when we're seeing results like that you have to start questioning whether the gigabit nick on this device is a limiting factor in the speed test that we're seeing and my question is for a 4x4 multi-user mimo access point that is capable of the theoretical speeds and throughput that this device is capable of why does it not have a 2.5 gigabit nic to me that is the one major design flaw with this access point because if any single client can be getting theoretically or in practical use as i've shown here upwards of eight or nine hundred megabits of throughput through this access point what happens when you have 20 clients capable of doing that do you think you're ever going to go up above that one gigabit threshold it seems like that's a pretty severe bottleneck on this device and i mean i don't know what it would cost uh you know add to the cost to put in a 2.5 gigabit nick but ubiquity has multiple multi-gigabit switches on the horizon so it's a little odd to me that they didn't include the 2.5 gigabit nick in this device so to me i think that would have made this device absolutely perfect and again i'm sure it was probably considered internally maybe was just a cost thing if it was going to bump up the price too much you know the msrp on the device too much or something like that anyways let me know your thoughts about that down in the comments below and now back to the video okay now let's take a look at the open speed test testing this is where each one of those four clients ran three different speed tests against an open speed test server running in a docker container uh on a nas in my network here and we can see some pretty interesting results so the two ubuntu pcs uh ended up an average of 364. the first ubuntu pc was 364 down 531 up the second was 426 down 531 up which is actually interesting because for these tests wi-fi 6-1 is in the same room as the u6 lr and wi-fi 6-2 which got a better score uh is actually up in the attic so that one's a full room away but ended up getting a better score now we see a really impressive score with my own windows 10 desktop 852.7 download and 842.7 upload average and then finally the windows 10 lenovo desktop that i've got in the other room 502 megabits by 541 megabits finally we have our sustained throughput test this is where i start all of these clients downloading a very large file at the same time to see what kind of throughput we're getting to all four of those clients simultaneously and what we ended up with was a total throughput of 292 megabits so how does that stack up though right this is a 4x4 multi-user mimo box and i'm actually not entirely convinced that this is a good test i'm going to have to rethink the testing methodology for this one i think the total throughput is being hampered by the fact that i'm copying the same large file from a truenas server and granted it's got a 10 gigabit nic but four machines pulling down that same exact file simultaneously might actually be causing some disk io slowness so i'm going to have to investigate that a little bit further but it is still the same test that i ran against all of these other access points so we should see some difference in how the u6lr stacks up against all of the rest so let's do that next what was our iperf distilled testing and i am proud to announce that in our iperf testing we have a new reigning champion in the u6 lr and we have a new reigning reigning champion by like quite a lot so the average uh iperf score for the u6 lr is 520 megabits per second the next closest competitor was almost 200 megabits slower than that it was 349 megabits per second so yeah that's quite a jump so you look at the u6 light and the the ingenious ews 850 ap they were sort of neck and neck in this testing with the ingenious just slightly edging out the u6 light well this u6 lr just blew the doors off of both of those access points but how did it do in the open speed test test let's take a look at that next again we have a new champion the u6 lr once again more than 100 megabits faster on average than the u6 light in our open speed test testing really really impressive score 571. 574.1 average megabits per second for the open speed test test and let's take a look at finally the sustained throughput test and in this test the u6 lr did not become the champion so the the old-school nano hd the wi-fi five nano hd still edged out the u6 lr by about 20 megabits in the sustained throughput testing which again i'm gonna have to rethink my methodology on that i'm not sure if it's exactly sound but these are the results that we got for that test now let's take a look at everything combined so if we take the averages of all of these scores and we put all of these access points up against each other to see the crosstalk benchmark score should be no surprise that the u6 lr is now our new reigning access point champion with just over 400 megabits average between all of these different tests and it's you know 50 megabits faster than the next closest competitor which is really really great one final metric is the bang for your buck right this is 179 versus the you know u6 light at 99 so is it worth a hundred is it 179 and 80 dollars more worth it than this access point let's take a look at that next we're talking about the bang for your buck metric where the lower the score the better right because that's sort of the price per megabit with the u6 light coming in at 29 cents per megabit in my testing the u6 lr is now second place so it actually did really really well it did so well that the fact that it's 80 more uh just bumped it up to 45 cents per megabit so it's it's a it's a strong solid second place as far as bang for your buck but this is not really a fair comparison right the u6 light is a two by two multi-user mimo access point this is a four by four this has massively stronger gain on the antennas than the u6 light so they're really used for completely different deployments this is more of a business or a really dense environment deployment whereas the u6 light is for like your home right it's for you know for clients connect for your roku and your playstation to connect to the internet uh totally different use cases for these two devices so i would say uh the more interesting thing is that the bang for your buck for the u6 lr came in a significantly lower than the nano hd right so my sort of go-to access point for business uh deployments the nano hd i think that the u6 lr is at this point a better buy you get more for your money with the u6 uh lr than you do with the nano hd by a pretty decent amount so by 15 cents per per megabyte megabit the nano hd comes in at 60 cents per megabit the u6 lr comes in at 45 cents per megabit so again not the most scientific testing but what is scientific about this testing is that i tested all of these access points in literally exactly the same way so even if my testing isn't perfectly sound the results should be sound when compared to all of the other access points that i've tested here okay what do you guys think i actually really like this access point i think i'm going to put this into place in my own uh home office here and uh and actually start using it and see what the experience is like using the u6 lr and see if i get a much better performance than what i'm using today which is the u6 lite okay there you go put your thoughts down below i'd love to hear what you think about the u6 lr what do you think about the benchmark testing what other access points would you like me to test put all of that down in the comments and i will take a look and read through absolutely everything that you write okay if you guys enjoyed this video make sure you give me a thumbs up if you'd like to see more videos like this please click subscribe my name is chris with crosstalk solutions and thank you so much for watching you

Channel: Crosstalk Solutions

Views: 153,344

Keywords: U6-LR, crosstalk, crosstalk solutions, u6-lr-us, u6-lr review, u6-lr-us review, u6-lr-us vs u6-lite-us, u6-lr vs nanohd, u6-lr-us vs uap-ac-hd-us, u6-lr vs ac-hd, u6-lr ubiquiti, u6-lr-us vs uap-ac-pro, u6-lr-us poe injector, u6-lr vs uap-ac-pro, u6-lr reveiw, u6-lr-us reveiw, u6-lr-us mesh, u6-lr unifi 6 ax3000, ubiquiti, ubiquity, unifi, unifi access points, unifi access point

Id: uUeUZTesj3M

Length: 22min 16sec (1336 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021