UniFi Express - How fast is it when it’s meshed??

like a lot of you out there I've been excited to get my hands on these new UniFi Express devices now one of the things that I was curious about specifically with these is how well does it handle mesh do you lose speed really bad things like that can it compete with I mean should you look at buying one of these versus maybe like an ero or an Orbee or a TP link so I was really excited to be able to do that because you get all the benefits of a ubiquity Network in a mesh system and I think that's really really great but we need to put these things to the test now what you may or may not know is that ubiquity has always had the ability for their devices to communicate with each other wirelessly using mesh so you could take two access points that take a physical cable and actually mesh them together to extend coverage in your house uh and I was really exced excited about that uh as a matter of fact previously they came out with a product called The Beacon um and it was designed to be an extension of your network and would only communicate wirelessly to other access points with ubiquity it was it was adopted in the system it was treated just like an access point but there were no physical cables connected to it it got its power off a cable outlet and I was really excited for that because as someone who's done um uh provided services in homes that sometimes those homes don't always have wires pulled so I was excited about the capability of mesh and and you know being able to bring ubiquity into more houses so to speak but I was kind of left wanting I had mixed results I'd have weird disconnects I'd get you know some of them will become isolated and they it's hard to get them back online and it just you know I think it's come a long way it's definitely a lot more stable nowadays but when I was first really playing with this I wasn't that impressed yeah you got all the benefits but the the set when you updated everything if you didn't do them in a certain order they just things would get disconnected and I just I really didn't care for it it was a lot less it was more challenging and less seamless than say something like an Orbee or an ero where you just hit a button everything updates and comes back online so um I kind of put it aside so when this guy came out something that in my opinion is designed to do this be Wireless I know it can have a physical connection but to me it's kind of marketed as a as a mesh product I I want to see if how it worked I want to see how it behaved plus I haven't used the meshing technology in a while because I didn't have good luck with it so let's see what they've fixed and I'm just curious what kind of performance we get out of these guys can it be or should it be considered in a home that doesn't have wires in it to be able to get Wi-Fi let's just see all right so here's my plan I really want to try to create a real real world scenario as to whether or not someone should should look at these devices sure they have specs and can you turn on all the features and get the speeds and yeah that's all great stuff but is this a good system to just I want to be able to do VLS but I don't have wires in my home here at ethernet blueprint I get asked all the time about retrofitting houses how do I pull wires after the fact I want one of these systems but I just can't you know get the wires in places I don't have crawl spaces or attics whatever and so it just boils down to is this a good solution should they be looking at something like this to get all the benefits of the ubiquity and vlans and creating Security in their home Remote Management all of it in something that's built to be a mesh so what I'm going to do is I'm going to just kind of test some general uh connectivity so my goal with these is to I'm going to force my device to connect to just this one and the way I've done that is is I've created a ubiquity uh a 5G only Network that broadcasts only on this device device this device is not broadcasting it and so what that'll allow me to do is force my device to always connect to this one then I'm just going to keep moving them farther and farther and farther and see what happens with the speeds does it drastically drop off um or does it stay pretty consistent um so we'll do a baseline here and the Baseline I will do to just this guy by itself I'll connect directly to him that's our Baseline now I have Verizon 5G service so sometimes it's all over the place I typically get between 250 and 300 most times um so it just kind of depends on what that um service is doing so we'll kind of set a Baseline and we'll do our test now one real quick thing I want to point out here that I really like about these devices is I love the signal meter I really like the built-in signal meter telling you that you know it's it can see its buddy and it actually gives you how strong the signal is that is a great design feature I think that's going to help the everyday person deploy these correctly so well done ubiquity I think that's a great option there all right so I'm going to get my Baseline set up we'll do a speed test and then we're going to start connecting to this guy uh in the same room and eventually I'll move it up a floor and let's just see what these things can do so the first thing I'm going to test is from my computer which is physically connected to the land let's see what a physical connection's given us for Speed and then we'll decide kind of how the Wi-Fi is doing from there so looks like we're doing about 212 208 okay so that's going to be kind of our Baseline looks like it's spiked up to 224 but around 220 is what we're getting wirelessly and and I think the upload speed for here is 20 Megs so it should go down to around 20 meg um here so typically I don't have problems with my upload speeds so we're going to use this as our Baseline the next one I'm going to do is connected directly to the main Puck as we'll call it uh wirelessly for my phone and I'll do that and then we'll start connecting to the mesh and seeing what happens to the speed here we go okay so our good test it's a good test even a little bit faster than the hardwire connection with Wi-Fi so that's awesome 243 so I was standing about I don't know four feet away from it when I did the test so now what we're going to do is I'm going to connect to the remote Puck and we're going to a speed test with them fairly close together now mesh can be too close so it might be kind of a wash of a test but basically I kind of want to just start with them close together with a full signal strike between the two of them and just kind of see what happens to the speed so here we go okay so test one right now they're about 10 feet away which nobody would ever deploy them like that they're in the same room everything you know by all means they should work perfectly uh and as you can see my speeds are great even faster than connecting directly too so Verizon must have some people going to bed tonight uh because my speed are going up so again no drop uh this was at 30 minus 38 DBS uh which is you know super strong signal strength so we're going to go ahead and move a little bit further and see how it goes okay so another good test this was uh minus 63 DB so a little bit further away um they're about 50 feet away from each other same room and as you can see speed tests great great results we're we're still maxing out I would say our speeds which is awesome so for the next test I'm going to take it upstairs and it's going to have to go through a floor and let's see what happens okay so we got our first slower test now it states at it's at minus 70 DB it is probably about 30 feet away but it is up through the floor so um but yeah I think speed sacrifice a little bit um all right so I'm going to move it again to the other side of the room see what they do when it gets a really far away and we'll kind of wrap up our test results and and sum things up okay so this side I it's pretty far away I it's up a floor and clear across the house it's at minus 70 DB and as you can see our speed sacrifice but really that's what I would think should happen the farther you get it away from its buddy your speeds are going to slower that's that's normal it's the amount of slowing that concerns me um in in this particular case but let's I'm going to do one more test and uh we'll see how that goes okay so that test was better for sure um so what I did was instead of moving the puck really far away I put the puck closer so it's at like a minus 60 DB right now kind of right above its buddy but I'm clear across my house now so I'm a good 30 40 feet away from the mesh Puck which is the one I'm connected to and then it's closer to his buddy and as you can see I ran much faster speeds than barely being able to pull 100 a little bit ago so that's probably the strategy we need to use so let's kind of summarize our findings here it's not a bust now this I was pretty impressed with some of the speeds we got however as you notice in the video they obviously got slower now that's generally how Wi-Fi works okay so let's not take that out of the equation the farther you are away from your original Wi-Fi source the slower your speeds are that's the same with access points too however to me where this thing lacks is the back haul because it's just a dualband device it's using the same antennas that you're connecting to from your devices to communicate back to his buddy and therefore it's it's sacrificing some of the speed I think think this would be a tremendous device if they made it Tri band if there was two 5 GHz bands on this thing one was dedicated for the back hul and that way you didn't sacrifice those speeds as you after you got things kind of set up that's one of the things I've liked about the Eros and some of the Orbeez and and really any mesh system that I test and recommend they're almost always triband because I like that extra 5 GHz channel for the devices to be able to communicate on I just think it gives you that boost and speed you need however if you are looking to get into the uh ubiquity ecosystem here this thing's pretty awesome I think as far as a strategy goes on placing it is is make sure this thing is 60 DB or better you know so it's minus 60 is great 50 is better 30 is better you know that's how the numbers work um you know 60 are better and then use that to boost up uh signals in your house for example one of the better results I got was I had this one down here I had the other one almost kind of right above it in my kitchen and then I was connected to it from across the room it was the last speed test result you can see we weren't pulling 300 but we also weren't pulling 80 or 90 so um I thought that was probably the best strategy for deploying um I also had a refrigerator kind of in the way so that probably paid uh paid some um uh played into my results a little bit um but at the end of the day pretty darn nice little device I think there's room for some improvement and as long as they don't have issues with them disconnecting and being isolated like I was describing earlier in the video I think these will be a great device so hopefully this helps you guys like I said I just kind of wanted to I just wanted to see how they do um should you look at going doing like this I'm actually going to do the same test with my sonies and see how they do now they are triband so that would give you kind of an apples apples comparison between a triband system that can do VLS and a dual band system that can do vlans just one is ubiquity and one isn't so um good little product I'm pretty pleased with it and uh I hope to uh do some more tests and uh send you guys the feedback so it helps you have a good day

Channel: Ethernet Blueprint

Views: 16,462

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Id: iMHwQeJEG2w

Length: 12min 16sec (736 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 14 2023