This is the UniFi Dreamwall. Is this a revolution in the form factor of networking gear, or is it a ridiculous product that's gonna end up being quietly discontinued a year from now? Let's dig in and find out. Within one minute of this morning's Dreamwall release, I received a new product notification via SMS from UI Notify. Coincidentally, it was at this exact same time that I found out Linus Sebastian sleeps naked because I was in the middle of watching the LTT Hack Update video. UI Notify sends out free product notifications the moment Ubiquiti and other products come in stock. You can be notified via email, by following at UI Notify on Twitter, or by checking out the product notifications channel in the Crosstalk Discord server, all completely free. UI Notify is now just over one year old and we have made some significant improvements. We now have the ability to notify on any of the international Ubiquiti stores, as well as the full product lines for common distributors such as Baltic Networks and ISP supplies. We've also added enhanced search capabilities that will now notify you of the products you want across any of these stores and locations, and we've made it much easier to find and add products to your notify list. So be sure to check out uinotify.net and don't miss out on the products you want. The UniFi Dreamwall is a wall-mountable UniFi OS console that features an integrated firewall, 4x4 MIMO Wi-Fi 6 access point, as well as a whole bunch of switch ports. The price for the Dreamwall is $999 US, and as of the recording of this video, it is in stock and available to purchase. Now, if you'll notice here on the front of the box, I have an EA version of the Dreamwall. I bought this for $799. The price has gone up by 200 bucks. $799 back in May, 2022. And at that time, the Dreamwall has this little, what is probably the same 1.3-inch touchscreen that you see on all of the Ubiquiti switches, very common. And they have since replaced that touchscreen with a 4.7-inch touchscreen instead of this little tiny one. So the newer versions, the newer hardware versions of this Dreamwall are gonna look a little bit different. And if you buy one today, you're not gonna get the exact same one that I'm showing in this video. Whoa, look at this thing. So it is quite heavy, ugh. And here we can see that little 1.3-inch touchscreen. Again, the new one is a 4.7-inch touchscreen. It's a lot bigger on the overall face of the device. Let's go ahead and take it out. Oh, boy. Okay, so besides the Dreamwall, it looks like we get a mounting plate that has a little level built in. Quick start guide. And I assume there's gonna be some cables in here somewhere. There we go, power cable, some screws and drywall anchors. And that looks to be about it. Wow, it is quite heavy. Now on the side here, it looks like we've got some stuff popping out. Let me pull off this plastic. So this is a power supply. It looks like it has redundant PSUs. Yep, so two separate PSUs in here. Now, interestingly, it has two separate PSUs, but it only has a single power cord. So in a true sort of dual power supply environment, like we do on the Voice over IP and PBX side of the house, you would really want two separate power supplies, each with their own individual power cords so that you could potentially run those to different power circuits in a data center. Oh, this second one is actually stuck up. Oh, well that's disappointing. Let me check this one again. What am I doing wrong here? I think it is right, let's see. Slides in like that. Ah, there we go, okay, I got it. No, that was my fault. And how do we get inside this thing? Ah, here we go. Oh, geez, this is heavy. Look, it's moving my entire mat. And here we have the device itself. Now these are labeled PSU1, PSU2. We've got core underneath here. And then across the top, we have all of the various switch ports right here. And what we have are four PoE ports, that's 802.3af, four PoE plus ports, that's 802.3at, and then four PoE++ ports, which is 802.3bt. Now the BT ports are used to power things like the UniFi Access Hub, which requires BT power, as well as that large $1,800 pan tilt zoom camera. Now besides that, we also have four non-PoE ports, and then we have a 10 gig SFP plus cage right here. All right, so now flipping around to the sort of front set of ports, and I'll get some better B-roll so you can see this, but there are some ports in here with a channel that runs up from the bottom. And in here is where we plug in power. It also has one of those locking power cables so that it has a little notch in the side so that it locks in there and won't come out unless you flip this little switch. And then we have a single ethernet port. We have a second WAN 2.5 gigabit ethernet port, and then we have a 10 gigabit SFP cage, a second SFP cage, but this one is specifically for the WAN. There is also a slot for a micro SD card, which is currently empty. There is no micro SD card in there. I do believe though it has 128 gig SSD on board. So if we swing around the back here, we have this little sort of pull down bar, which I assume works in conjunction with the mounting plate. This goes on the wall and then this goes on like that. And then it sort of snugs up to the wall. You can kind of pull it down and off as needed. So this device is made to be mounted on the wall, which I get it. Okay, that's fine. I kind of like that they're trying to do something different. You know, 19 inch form factor racks have been around forever and they do take up some space to have a rack sitting around your office or your home. So having a fully integrated sort of all-in-one firewall, you know, wifi, switch ports, et cetera, hanging on the wall can be quite attractive. But I don't know if I like the design of this and here's why. Number one, your power cable, your WAN cable, et cetera, comes in from the bottom, right? So it comes up through this channel here and you can plug in your WAN ports. You can plug in your power. All of the switch ports though are on the top, right? So having this on the wall, you would almost kind of want the cables to be as hidden as possible. Like I would almost prefer that this switch port up top wasn't here at all. Like I'd rather almost have just the one set of cables that drops out the bottom and then, you know, you can plug it into a separate switch and distribute it as necessary. But of course then now you need a 19 inch rack with a rack mountable switch, et cetera, et cetera. So I get it, but it just seems very odd to me to have some cables coming up from the bottom and then some cables coming out the top. So unless you have specifically designed your network infrastructure, your cabling infrastructure for this device, meaning that you have a place for cables to terminate at the top and the bottom of this device, for instance, maybe a patch panel or that everything's wired into the wall from there, et cetera. It just seems like a very odd design choice to me. Let me know what you guys think in the comments below. The next step for this device is I am going to get this mounted up on the wall. I'm gonna put it right here above my actual 19 inch rack and yeah, we'll see how easy it is to install. installation and setup of the UniFi dream wall was pretty straightforward. It took me about 10 minutes to get it mounted. And since the dream wall is about 20 pounds or so, I opted to put one side of the mounting bracket into a wall stud. And then I use the included drywall anchors for the other side. Adoption into UniFi was also really easy. That's one of the nice things about UniFi devices. They're always super easy to adopt and update. It took me like one minute to find the device in UniFi, connect to it and configure it. And then from there, it took about 20 minutes to update all of the various software, firmware and applications. Once the dream wall was adopted, it's essentially like any other UniFi all in one device, like the dream router. You've got all of your standard UniFi applications, such as network protect access and talk. And from here, basically you're all done. I mean, the base configuration is pretty much already set up for a home or small business. And if you're looking to really dial it in, I would recommend going through my UDM Pro complete setup video tutorial series, which pretty much should apply to this device 100%. When it comes to the noise level of the dream wall, it is absolutely whisper quiet. The fan speed according to the touchscreen display is running at about 40%. Now keep in mind though, that's while the dream wall is basically idle with no PoE devices and no traffic flowing through it. Temperature wise however, this is a different story. So the dream wall does run pretty hot. Now, according to the touchscreen display, it's at about 149 degrees Fahrenheit. Testing it with a thermometer, I measured up to 120 degrees on the front of the device. And then I also measured between 115 to 120 degrees on the wall next to where the fan exhaust. Now keeping in mind also that there are no PoE devices in use, there's no traffic flowing through the dream wall. This is just the default temperature from a default state. If I had installed this in a Homer business with a lot of PoE devices and traffic flowing through it, I would definitely wanna keep an eye on the temperature. One interesting thing that I did notice is that while the two WAN ports, which are the internal 2.5 gig ethernet and 10 gig SFP plus cage that are actually labeled as WAN ports 19 and 20, within Unifi, you can actually set ports 16, 17, or 19 and 20 as WAN ports. Which means if you wanted all of the ethernet or all of the network connectivity to come in through the top of the device, then you have a one gig ethernet port as well as a second 10 gig SFP plus port that can both be used or configured as WAN ports. Let's talk about the form factor of this device. Now, on YouTube, I'm always hesitant to crap on a device because I don't like it, right? I try to remain positive, and by and large, I really love all of the stuff that Ubiquiti puts out. But that being said, I really just can't get behind this dream wall, I don't really understand it. Because let's take a look at the insides here. Everything boils down to the switch that is on top of the device, right? So first of all, here's all of your switch ports up here. And they're made to come out and then go where? Like where are they supposed to go? I guess into a patch panel. But this is like one inch off of the wall where these cables are gonna come out. A patch panel is gonna stick out even further than that if it's, unless it's like flush mounted into the wall or something. So kinda no matter what you do, it's gonna look pretty bad up top. And you'll even notice that in the marketing photos of the dream wall online, they don't ever show any cables coming out of the top of this device. And I think it's because they understand that it's not gonna look aesthetically pleasing to have this mess of cables popping off the top here. Now, one thing that they could do, and I think they actually have done in the newer hardware release of the dream wall, is poke some holes back here. So you see like these cables, my WAN cable and the power cable, are coming down this channel here and out the bottom. There's no way, like it would be nice to be able to push this straight through into the wall from here. The latest pictures do have what looks like a removable compartment right here where the power could potentially go straight into the wall. But they don't show that for up here around all of the ethernet cables. So I could see if they had some sort of rectangular notch that you could pull out of the top section here and then run all of these cables straight into the wall so that this looks more aesthetically pleasing just sitting on the wall. But as of right now, I don't see a way that that can happen. So here you can see I have put some cables, now these are just little short jumper cables. Obviously in a real world environment you'd probably have cables that are longer than this. But you can see like they just come out and then what do you do with them? You pull them out and put them into a patch panel up on top or something like that. It's just, I don't know, it's just not gonna look great. So the other thing is this is a thousand dollar device. Personally, and again, I know that they're trying to sort of get away from the 19 inch rack mount form factor, but like what does this device have that like the UDM-SE doesn't have? And really it comes down to all of the switch ports on the top, as well as the redundant power supply. For $999, I would much rather see all of the components of the Dreamwall in a 2U form factor rack mount device. So you could have your redundant PSUs in the back, you could have a 16 or 24 port switch across one of the U's in the front and then the other space above the switch or below the switch, whatever, in a 2U rack mount form factor could be for potentially like redundant hard drives or something like that. To me, that would be a much better product than whatever this is trying to be. So there you have a quick look at the UniFi Dreamwall from Ubiquiti Inc. As far as my customers, I don't think I'm gonna be recommending this device, but I'm just one guy with an opinion on YouTube. So what is your opinion? Do you believe that there is a place for this device for your own customers? I'd love to hear about that, put it down in the comments below. And if you'd like to keep this party going, I have hand selected two videos over here on the right for you to watch next. The top video is my recent step-by-step tutorial for setting up Cloudflare tunnels and the bottom video is my review of T-Mobile home internet, which I used for the setup of this UniFi Dreamwall.
