UniFi U6-Lite WiFi 6 Access Point - Review and Benchmarks!

welcome to crosstalk solutions my name is chris and we finally have one of the new wi-fi six access points from ubiquiti inc right here in my hands this is the unifi 6 lite model number u6 dash light dash us the msrp on this access point is 99 and this is one of two wi-fi six access points from ubiquiti inc that is currently available outside of the early access store as of the recording of this video the other one is the long range version the lr version of the unifi 6 ap so this access point is wi-fi 6 that is the 802.11 ax wi-fi standard you might hear someone say wi-fi 6 they might say 802.11 ax they might say high efficiency wireless all of those mean the same thing and it's the new wi-fi six standard and they just call it wi-fi six because wi-fi six is much easier to say than 802.11ax online this device says that it has an aggregate throughput of 1.5 gigabits per second but that claim is actually a little bit misleading because no single device would ever get 1.5 gigabits worth of throughput out of this device first and foremost it only has a gigabit uh physical network connection on the access point itself when they say 1.5 gigabits of aggregate throughput they're talking about 1.2 gigabits of throughput total in the 5 gigahertz band that's a it's a 2x2 multi-user mimo 5 gigahertz or 300 megabits per second in the 2.4 gigahertz band and for 2.4 gigahertz it has 2x2 mimo capabilities so you take the 300 megabits of 2.4 gigahertz and the 1.2 gigabits of 5 gigahertz and you slap those together and basically if this thing was completely maxed out with clients in both 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz you would have a total of 1.5 gigabit per second capacity but again considering that it only has a gigabit uh nick on the device itself you're never going to see those speeds not even really in a perfect environment now there are many many advantages of wi-fi 6 over wi-fi 5 which is the 802.11 ac standard really i'm going to do a completely separate video on wi-fi 6. that's how many improvements there are over wi-fi 5. however the improvements in wi-fi 6 are less about speed to a single client and more about overall capacity in dense environments so basically wi-fi six increases efficiency and capacity when you've got a ton of clients connected to your access points okay so i have a lot of people ask me you know is it worth upgrading to wi-fi six and to answer that question i would say it depends right how dense is your wireless environment how many devices are on your network and that's going to really make the difference for you because if you have just a standard home with you know say 20 or so different devices you know tvs and rokus and nintendo switch and playstation and you know all of your laptops and iphones and ipads maybe you've got like 20 or 30 of those devices at home wi-fi five is still gonna be just fine like you're not gonna see much improvement for wi-fi six but if you have 50 or a hundred devices you know iot devices and everything's trying to compete for the same uh you know uh radio frequency bandwidth then you might see an improvement with wi-fi 6. so what i would recommend is if you're coming from something older than 802.11 ac it's probably worth upgrading if you're thinking about upgrading anyways or if you don't have access points at all maybe you just have the one that came with your isp and you want to implement a real wireless network a you know quote unquote real wireless network i would say at that point it's worth investing in wi-fi 6 instead of the older generation wi-fi all right so let's take this thing out of the box and talk some more about some of the specifications of the u6 lite access point all right so here's the u6 light dash us msrp is 99 on this unit here we have some mounting hardware here's the access point itself beautiful look at this so it has this nice plastic case or covering i should say and it says right there unifi six look at that that is just absolutely gorgeous one thing to note is this is the exact same form factor as the nano hd access point so the wi-fi five nano hd so not only can you use the same mounting bracket as the net the nano hd here we have the same mounting bracket uh but you can also use the nano hd skins on this u6 light so you get the mounting bracket the access point itself and you also get the uh drop ceiling mounting bracket all right so let's take a look at this device a little bit closer on the back side really not much to it we have a gigabit ethernet port and then we also have our standard reset hole reset switch this device can be powered by either 802.3 af poe or 48 volt passive poe it has a maximum power consumption of 12 watts and if we're talking about antenna gain it's 2.8 dbi for the 2.4 gigahertz antenna and 3 dbi for the 5 gigahertz antenna the operating temperature of this device is actually pretty impressive so for operating temperature it can go from -30 to 60 degrees celsius which is minus 22 degrees to 140 degrees fahrenheit now keep in mind though this is not an outdoor rated access point notice that there's no like you know plastic covering or you know they have like those rubber grommet coverings for the uh how does this thing go on here there we go uh usually you'll have like for the uap ac pro for instance there was like a rubber uh sort of you know covering or insert that went in right here that helped keep it a little bit watertight this one does not have any such thing so while it does have some pretty extreme operating temperature capability it's not actually an outdoor access point but like i wouldn't have any problem sticking this thing up in my attic which is actually probably where it's going to end up living once i am done with the testing here on the product page for the u6 lite ubiquity also recommends two different types of mounting right so you've got mounting from the ceiling sort of top down and this is for more dense environments if you have a lot of clients connecting to this device top down is the way to go or you can mount it sideways vertically on the wall if you are trying to extend the range of the access point so for instance if you have it on one side of your house and you want to sort of extend the range all the way through your house you're going to get more range out of this device by putting it on the wall facing the way that the direction that you want the range as opposed to having it right on the you know mounted horizontally on the ceiling now what i typically recommend is to have these access points as central as possible so if you have a house with just one access point try to get that access point like in the center of the home somewhere and as high up as you can go so like if it's a two-story home center of the home on the second story facing down to sort of cover the entire home if you have two access points you'd want them on sort of you know take the house divide it in two halves and put it in the center of each half facing down but again your results may vary it also depends on what type of building materials your house is made of and etc etc etc it's it's really hard to determine or give a definitive answer that will suit everyone for like best access point placement so if you're not sure then i would say mount it temporarily you know horizontally or vertically and see how it works right and if it doesn't work as well as you want it to try it the other way all right so now let's get this wi-fi six access point adopted into unifi i'm going to sort of set it up in a test environment and then we're going to start putting it through its paces with multiple wi-fi 6 clients i actually have a lot of different wi-fi clients that we're going to use for testing this device because again wi-fi 6 isn't about increased speeds to a single client wi-fi 6 is about increased aggregate speed to all of your clients and devices combined all right i have the u6 light plugged into one of my gen 2 pro switches which is connected to a udm pro i am currently running unify version 6.0.41 and once we're in unifi if we come over here and click on devices we now see a u6 light that is pending adoption so let's go ahead and click adopt and we are now connected it took about one minute to adopt i have a solid blue light on the access point and let's see if we uh we do have an upgrade so let's see it came to me with version 5.43 dot let's go ahead and upgrade it and it will upgrade it looks like from 5.43.14 to 5.43.19 we're going to go ahead and run the upgrade now all right there we go we have now upgraded to the latest version of firmware we are back to a solid blue light that took about two to three minutes to perform that upgrade in order to properly test wi-fi six i wanted to create an environment with multiple clients that i could use to test wi-fi simultaneously and i'm not setting this up to be like the perfect wi-fi six test environment i wanted to set up more of a real world type scenario so let's take a look at my wi-fi 6 test network here we have the internet coming into a udm pro all of the devices here are using the latest and greatest software and firmware the udm pro feeds into this usw pro 24 poe switch that is the gen 2 24 port pro switch which has the 10 gig sfps the reason that i wanted to use 10 gig sfps is because i have this server right behind me that has been configured as a true nas server and it has a 10 gig nic included in the server so i have a 10 gigabit connection between this server and that 24 port gen 2 pro switch the trunas server is going to serve two separate purposes first and foremost i have about 30 gigabytes worth of files sitting on a share on an ssd on that system that the wireless clients are going to be pulling down from the file server over the network which is why i wanted as much bandwidth as possible for this server so that the disk speeds and the onboard nick of the server are not a bottleneck in my wi-fi testing the second purpose for this server is as an iperf server so with trunas you get iperf built in if you drop to a shell and so if i run an iperf command here we can see this is from my desktop computer which is currently wired directly into that switch and it looks like we're pulling about 940 megabits per second between my computer and that switch of course the limitation there is not the nas server the limitation is the one gig nick that i have in my own pc okay so truenas is not going to be a bottleneck for serving files the other things that i have connected into this switch are of course the u6 light access point which is actually just above this painting right here on the wall and then also connected into that switch i have my qnap qgd 1600p that is a poe switch virtual machine appliance in one check out my video on the qnap qgd 1600p if you're interested on that qnap server i have two things first i have an ubuntu 20.04 virtual machine that is strictly there for running ansible by using ansible i can control my ubuntu clients simultaneously and basically do one central command that tells them both to start downloading files through wi-fi from the file server also on the qnap qgd 1600p i have an open speed test docker container so that i can run open speed test tests over the network not having to use an internet based speed test because my internet connection is only about four or five hundred megabits right so theoretically the speeds on the access point are going to be able to do far greater than speeds out to the internet in my case so here we can see what open speed test looks like this is an html5 based application if i hit start we will see what kind of speeds i can get between my computer which is hardwired into that gen2 switch and looks like we are getting very close to the maximum throughput of my machine which is you know it's got a one gig ethernet port yep so there we go we can see i got 985 down and 983 up so basically full gigabit speeds between my computer and that speed test the speed test itself is not going to be a bottleneck okay so that is my test network let's talk about the clients i'm using four different clients in total the first one here is ubuntu 20.04 running on a really really old pc this is an old amd a4 3420 with six gigs of ddr3 i did upgrade it however with a 120 gig ssd because again i don't want a mechanical hard drive to be any sort of bottleneck in the speed testing inside that computer i have a tp-link archer tx 3000e wi-fi 6 pcie card and that is an intel ax200 based wi-fi 6 chip on my own computer here my desktop is running windows 10 it is an intel i7 8700k with 32 gigs of ddr4 and my drive that i'm doing testing on is a samsung m.2 and vme drive in my system i forget the exact brand that i have but i have also an intel ax200 based wi-fi six pcie adapter okay so then my other two computers one is up in my attic so i didn't wanna do anything where all of my computers are in the same room with perfect line of sight to the wi-fi six access point one of my systems is literally sitting up in the dark in my attic about probably 30 to 40 feet that direction and it's going through drywall it's going through the framing of the house it's going through insulation it's going through hvac ducting it's not an ideal placement for a wi-fi testing server which is exactly what i wanted that server is running ubuntu 20.04 it's also a rather old pc but not super super old it's a 4th gen intel i5 4690k with 8 gigs of ram i also upgraded that system with an ssd it has a 500 gig ssd so i'm not using a brand name wi-fi 6 adapter up in that system either it is a u-bit wi-fi 6 adapter which is just again another intel ax 200 based wi-fi 6 pcie card one note about the pcie cards i had a heck of a time when i was first setting up this test environment because i have a lot of systems that have micro itx motherboards and the micro itx motherboards typically only have a single pcie x16 slot one thing that i found out after about three or four hours of troubleshooting is that the wi-fi six cards really only work in pci x1 slots or i should say they're recommended for x1 slots you can also get them in some of the other flavors in between x1 and x16 but the really high speed pci bus you know the x16 pci bus for like graphics cards are not good for the wi-fi six adapters so i tried it in both windows and ubuntu on a mini itx motherboard that only had a single pci x16 slot and it would not work the system would detect the card but it just was it was not able to initialize the card i have the same exact problem in both windows and ubuntu so if you're setting up any sort of wi-fi six test environment make sure you're not using pci x16 slots for your wi-fi six adapter the final system that i have some of you guys might recognize if you watch the channel this is a lenovo desktop this is the one that i bought at costco a few weeks ago when i was looking for a wi-fi six test machine i ended up keeping it because i didn't have enough machines when i had to rule out all of my mini itx machines uh i decided to just keep this one and we're uh we're just we're just using it as a windows 10 desktop right now it's being used to test wi-fi six that is an intel i5 10th generation one 10 400 chip 16 gigs of ddr4 and it has a 256 gig m.2 nvme drive all right there we have a look at the full test environment if you guys have any suggestions for how i can improve this test environment make sure you put those down in the comments below but let's move on to the actual testing so i ran a number of tests and i did them with each computer individually i also did some tests of all of the computers pulling data through the network simultaneously and i also wanted to pit the u6 light up against a different ubiquity access point and so i chose our old standard okay so this is the y55 or 802.11 ac uac ap uap ac pro right this is the standard ubiquity or unifi pro access point from the y55 series of access points and man we have deployed literally hundreds of these over the years we absolutely love this access point it's basically been our standard go-to access points for just normal deployments for as long as i can remember so i felt this would be a good competitor against wi-fi 6. so we'll get into the sort of comparisons versus the uap ac pro in just a little bit but let's start off by taking a look at our iperf testing okay so uh so i ran all of these different tests i ran five different iperf tests we have iperf dash c and then the client right so that's just a standard straight up no arguments iperf test i did the same thing but with the dash r flag which runs its server to client instead of client to server then i did another test where i added in five simultaneous threads so that's the dash p5 i also ran that same test in reverse and then finally i ran a test that was a time based test of 60 seconds to see what kind of throughput i could get over time and i ran these tests against each separate computer in my wi-fi 6 test network so let's start with the first one this is the ubuntu uh this is wi-fi one uh that's this system here it's the old-school ubuntu amd a4 based processor and we can see the kind of speeds that we got here so this is blue on the chart here this system has perfect line of sight to the access point it's literally sitting about five feet that way and the access points about two feet above my head right here perfect line of sight and we can see that with this old hardware we were getting uh you know about 450 or so uh megabits average actually looks like 433 to be precise 433 megabits average between all of these tests that's the blue line on this graph right here so it was actually kind of our second best test machine if you will the first best was my more powerful crosstalk desktop you can see that i got really better speeds in a couple of ways but the average actually the average was lower so the average for my desktop was lower than for this old-school amd a4 processor although there's a little bit less line of sight from my desktop because it's underneath this wooden desk so it did have a little bit of obstruction it's not pure line of sight although it is in the same room it's like about 10 feet or less away from the actual access point so those two were by far the best we can see the blue and the yellow lines here then we get into wi-fi 6-2 that is my i5 ubuntu based pc that's located up in my attic and the speeds that we got for this thing were an average of 222 megabits on the iperf testing so going through the attic going through the insulation and the wooden beams and the hvac ducting and all that sort of stuff dropped the speeds down a little bit but still pretty respectable we'll see how it stacks up to the same test but not on the wi-fi six on the older generation access point in just a little bit then we have my lenovo desktop and we can see that that one was kind of more all over the place i got an average speed between all of the tests of about 280mbps second that machine is actually in the next room over so it's about probably 30 feet away from the access point through a closed door through some walls etc it's got better line of sight to the access point than the one in the attic does but it's still not that far it still got some uh obstruction in the way and we can see the green line here the lenovo desktop was actually pretty slow 122 down here for this test 282 442 298 and then 259. all right let's move on to our open speed test testing now the way that i did open speed test testing is i went to every single machine individually and i ran the open speed test test three times and then i took the average of those three runs and i made that sort of what i put into the graph here so wi-fi 6-1 the ubuntu server that's sitting in this room with perfect line of sight to the access point the download average was 348 megabits the upload average was 578 megabits then we have wi-fi 6-2 that is my attic based pc running ubuntu and that was much slower but also more consistent on the upload and download about 243 download 246 upload my crosstalk desktop the one that i'm filming this on right here got really good results 653 megabits down 694 megabit average up and then finally the lenovo desktop which is a really nice powerful pc but it's located in the other room we got 475 megabits down and 412 megabits up so definitely seeing some decent speeds here but we see the best speeds when you're in the same room as the access point right if you have decent line of sight to the access point your speeds are going to be far greater than if you're going through some obstructions such as wood and drywall and insulation and stuff like that okay so this next test this was an interesting one and this is where to me i feel this is where the difference is between a two by two uh access point versus you know if it was the same access point but four by four so for instance the u6 light is a two by two multi-user mimo access point the u6 lr the next the long range version is a four by four multi-user uh mimo access point so we can think of mimo and multi-user mimo as essentially like lanes on a highway right if you have a 2x2 multi-user mimo access point that means you have two lanes on that highway two down and two up most of these wireless cards are also two by two right so they're taking up both lanes the multi-user mimo means that they can take up lanes simultaneously so there's you know more efficient communication when you have larger numbers of clients but if you had a four by four multi-user mimo access point and then multiple two by two pcie wi-fi six cards in your computers you're gonna get you know more more cars in the lanes if you will right so you can have more total bandwidth available to your clients when i talk about this u6 light sustained throughput test what i did is i've got 30 gigs worth of files sitting on this file server it's actually about three different files they're just you know movie mp4 files from you know videos that i've been creating on youtube and i started all of the systems downloading those files simultaneously right so 30 gigs of files at you know 80 to 50 megabit right somewhere in this range uh is going to take a long time to download so i would start the download i would let it sit for a few minutes just to make sure you know things are now chugging along smoothly and then i would measure the average bandwidth of each machine as it was downloading its data for the ubuntu machine in the same room as the access point i was getting 81 megabits for the one in the attic i was getting 32 megabits sustained and then for both of the windows pcs i just put them at 50 because it's really hard to get an average measurement on on a windows pc there's a utility called enlode that you can use in ubuntu that you know it just makes it really easy to see the average speed of your throughput whereas it's not quite as easy to see that i'm just using like the windows you know process manager excuse me task manager and i just come over here and i'm looking at the you know the the the wireless card and just sort of you know gauging the average by eye so each of the windows 10 machines was pulling about 50 megabits average so the total throughput when all four machines were sucking down 30 gigs worth of files simultaneously drops down to 213 megabits so that's really interesting to me right so for instance you look at the open speed test and like my desktop was pulling you know upwards of 700 megabits doing the speed test to the wi-fi six adapter but when there's a lot of machines even though all of the machines were connected at 802.11ax there was no wi-fi five clients in the mix whatsoever the sustained throughput when they're all downloading files simultaneously dropped way low right we came down to 213 megabits per second and my guess is that the additional overhead of basically scheduling packets to all four of those machines as they're trying to download them is what really slowed down this access point and i'm going to be anxious to test the same test but with a 4x4 multi-user mimo wi-fi 6 access point which hopefully i will be getting my hands on soon all right moving on to the main event how does the u6 light stack up to the uap ac pro the sort of old standard ubiquity access point let's take a look at that next here is our iperf testing now i broke out these charts into each individual iperf test that i was running so let's take a look at them individually the blue is the u6 light access point and the red is the uap ac pro the way that i did this test is i shut off all other wi-fi in the house and then i had one access point or the other up on the wall basically in the same position for both of these tests i was pretty impressed by these results the wi-fi six axis point outperformed the uap ac pro even though this is a three by three mimo and that's a two by two mimo right so look at this i mean we're talking about 450 megabits versus 300 megabits for the one in the attic it was actually just about even for my desktop again we saw about a 30 or so improvement with the wi-fi 6 access point and even the lenovo desktop in the other room we saw some improvement same thing over here across the board the u6 light in iperf speed testing was about 50 percent faster 50 to 100 faster than the uap ac pro we come down here to the multi-threaded test and it's the same thing wi-fi 6-1 ubuntu pc was significantly faster same with the crosstalk desktop it was about twice as fast and lenovo desktop was about twice as fast the one in the attic was about the same then we have the same test but server to client and again we see the wi-fi six access point just dragging the uap ac pro through the mud i mean just look at the differences in speeds here it's pretty amazing now down here we have the sustained time based test and again the u6 light came out on top again in every single one of these tests all right let's look at the open speed test comparison so here we have the download speeds versus the upload speeds and again the u6 light has definitely beat out the uap ac pro i mean look at the differences here for something like my desktop machine it's significant that's more than twice as much throughput to my desktop versus the uap ac light same thing with the lenovo desktop these are both windows 10 machines these two ubuntu machines over here saw improvement but not quite as much improvement as the windows 10 machines then we come over here the upload speed and same thing we're seeing almost the same differences in the upload speed as we are in the download speed finally we talked about that sustained throughput test right that's where i use ansible to start file copies on both of the ubuntu machines simultaneously and then i went to each of the windows machines and i started the same file copy we're trying to pull like 30 gigs worth of files from the file server through this one access point to four different clients simultaneously and we can see here that the sustained throughput of the uap ac pro was about 163 164 megabits per second versus the u6 light running that same test was 213 megabits per second okay so again the sustained throughput test with all of those clients downloading files simultaneously the u6 lite still won out over the three by three mimo uap ac pro so i was really impressed with that i thought that it would be maybe dead even with the uap ac pro but no the the light access point basically blew the doors off this thing and so it also made me excited for the like the lr and the other you know wi-fi six based access points that are coming out that have four by four multi-user mimo i cannot wait to test those now to see how much those uh stack up against even this u6 light so really impressed by all those speed tests and and honestly really impressed by the u6 light it's a it's a great little access point for 99 bucks would i recommend upgrading to the u6 lite that's that's the real question right and i i think it's i think it's worth an upgrade if you are ready to upgrade right so if you were going to be buying into ubiquiti for the first time i would definitely start off on the wi-fi 6 stuff don't wait right go ahead and get the wi-fi 6 stuff if you have older access points that are you know three to four years old and you're looking to replace them i would now replace those with the wi-fi six based access points right you might want to wait for some of the other models to come out but again what i'm seeing with this u6 light so far i'm really impressed by the numbers and again wi-fi six technology is just much more efficient in denser environments than any of the predecessors and that's kind of what it all boils down to right so feedback let me know what you guys think what do you think about these tests uh do you want me to make these test results public where you guys can sort of look through them and let me know in the comments below and i can do that also what suggestions do you have for improvement of these tests i have other devices that i need to test and i want to start taking a running log of all of these different you know access points that i'm running these tests against uh tests against so that we can you know compare and contrast you know over time as new access points come out all right so that's gonna do it for this video hope you guys enjoyed it if you would like to see more videos like this make sure you hit subscribe and if you enjoyed this video give me a like down below it really helps out the channel okay that's gonna be it for the u6 light we will see you guys in the next video

Channel: Crosstalk Solutions

Views: 261,184

Keywords: U6-Lite, crosstalk, crosstalk solutions, u6-lite-us, u6-lite-us review, u6-lite-us-beta, u6-lite firmware, u6-lite-us vs nanohd, u6-lite-us vs u6-lr-us, u6-lite-us range, u6-lite-us-beta review, u6-lite-us-beta firmware, u6-lite-us vs uap-ac-lite, u6-lite vs u6-lr, u6-lite-us reveiw, ubiquiti, ubiquity, wifi 6, 802.11ax, unifi, u6-lite vs uap-ac-pro, uap-ac-pro, wifi 6 benchmarks

Id: f5WUifimRcE

Length: 35min 1sec (2101 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020