For those outside the IT/networking realms, SFP use uniform connectors for both the networking device and the fiber cable, but the major vendors (Cisco and friends) have used firmware flags and settings to provide vendor lock-in for at least the last 15 years.
It used to be that in the event of a major outage or hardware failure you would need to issue additional debug commands to the effect of "I know this isn't your approved SFP but please just try it," if you were trying to replace a first party SFP with a third party one. TAC would more or less laugh at you and hang up if you sought support.
I'm not sure if this product will _actually_ change any of that, but here's hoping.
> TAC would more or less laugh at you and hang up if you sought support.
This is common belief and even a dire warning when filing TAC tickets. However, unless the third-party SFP is the prime suspect, I have never experienced a TAC from any major networking vendor[1] refuse support, let alone "laugh and hang up," even metaphorically.
It's good SOP to keep at least a couple SFPs for each networking manufacturer on the shelf, but third-party SFPs are normally in the ballpark of 10% of the cost of OEM and tend to be manufactured better[2].
1. Mostly Cisco, Juniper, HPE, Fortinet
2. I've had a far greater failure rate on OEM SFPs than SFPs from third-parties like Fs.com and USCritical. That and they feel much less flimsy than OEM.
Before I comment, a disclaimer about my small scale. I have probably three hundred SFPs running, and less than five years of experience with optics. I don't have stock tracking for the individual manufacturers, and the failure rate comments here are based on gut-feel only. (there will be other people here used to far larger scales)
I bucket it into there being three options: genuine, clone, and good-clone.
We had a bad run with fs.com QSFP+s. Their SFPs have been better to me, but reckon I have had a couple fail.
Atgbics SFP+s to be a reliable supplier for us. I don't think I have had any of those fail, and they have been my main vendor for a while now. You can order them programmed with personalities for Cisco, etc.
Part of the edge of fs.com is that it is so easy to place an order and get fast delivery. My site is in another country from where I live, and I do a few trips a year. Several times they have made low-notice projects possible.
>I'm not sure if this product will _actually_ change any of that, but here's hoping.
SFP programmers have been around forever and work great. This will solve the issue. The only really unique thing here is the form factor and price. I think the last time I looked at a programmer 8 years ago I seem to recall it was about 10x this price. I’m guessing cheaper ones have popped up out of China since then.
Early this year I started redoing the backbone of my home network with 10 gb. Some of it's fiber, some of it's 10 gb copper Ethernet. It's been genuinely frustrating the weird incompatibilities between switches and SFP+ modules.
All my switches are MikroTik. My SFP+ modules are MikroTik, Ubiquiti, and some 3rd party ones from before I knew better.
I've had modules that will only run at gigabit in one switch but will give me the full 10 gb in another. I've had modules that refuse to work in one MikroTik switch but will happily work in a different MikroTik switch. I've just had a world of pain.
I've got everything basically working after months of fiddling and I'm inclined to just not… touch… anything.
I've had great luck with 10gtek modules both with Mikrotik gear, with DACs, and one that is connected to an upstream juniper switch. I'm curious what modules were the most troublesom.
* I will note that the 10gb sfp+ modules from 10gtek on a Mikrotik just don't work.
Funnily enough, this 10gtek worked on one of my 3 switches, but I could only establish a gigabit connection. I returned it [1]
These 10gtek fiber modules on the other hand have worked flawlessly so far. [2]
This Mikrotik module would not establish a 10 gb link with my Thunderbolt dock no matter what I tried. Works fine with my servers though so I swapped it out.
I've pretty much resigned myself to just buying the full brand Ubiqitui SFP+ adapters [4] for converting to copper.
I recently purchased [5] to run to my living room, but I have not found the time/energy to do the run.
This is not for me as I'm not a professional network engineer, but I do want to say that Ubiquiti has made home networking SO fun for me. Everything truly "Just Works."
My setup is definitely more on the prosumer side, but it's been so build out and inspect my network with their tools.
Tangentially related: is Mikrotik as bad for wireless as some say? I want to like them, even though their equipment seems complex, I root for a company from the Baltics that have carved out a respectable niche. But they appear to struggle with wireless?
Can someone explain what "just works" when compared to other networking gear? IE I use ASUS and their mesh, and it all "just works". Have a mix of routers over 10 years and they all mesh together.
This is exactly how it is for me too. Everything truly "just worked" - except Sonos, but that's not a Unifi problem - they even have a dedicated page in their docs on how to set up Sonos systems, which I followed exactly, and it now works a treat.
I made the switch to Ubiquiti from TP Link last year. 1000% worth it. The "Just Works (tm)" thing is true, but the ceiling of what you can do with it is so much higher. I'll also say that the Unifi nerds out there are legion and you can find support and comment threads all over the place for pretty much any project you want to do.
I ended up going with TP-Link Omada and have been happy so far (a managed switch and wifi 6 WAPs). I am a bit concerned about their security track record given how bad their soho products are, so I ended up sticking with my opnsense router at the perimeter as the first line of defense.
I’m curious to hear what you think you’re missing out on with Omada.
I made the same conclusions but got burned with Omada. Cheaper, yes, but fewer features and buggier than Unifi (and that’s a pretty low bar). I migrated back to Unifi.
I don't think I've run into any bugs, but there are also entire sections of the controller I haven't explored yet. I have a pretty typical homelab style setup with multiple wifi SSIDs for trusted devices and untrusted devices, and several VLANs to isolate them. I guess it's good to know rumors of Ubiquiti's death have been greatly exaggerated in case my Omada hardware starts acting up.
The two biggest complaints in that thread (Edgerouter support abandoned, and VLAN issue unacknowledged and unfixed) were both wrong. Overall, it is a great, easy, inexpensive set of products.
I've used both and was super interested to use Omada because of its price and performance. Honestly, Ubiquiti is just so much easier. The whole controller model for Omada tries to be way more "enterprisey" at the cost of a SOHO ease of use.
It depends, but for typical networking I'd say Ubiquti is actually offering better pricing here (outside of 10G LR) - and I'm saying that as someone who has sold 10s of thousands of FS modules to customers.
Note: Prices in () are the non-marked down limited time prices.
Side note for the HN crown: For ridiculous homelab 100G shenanigans look for Intel 100G-CWDM4 on sites like Ebay. They go for $4 a piece and work with SM LC fiber from 0-2000 meter runs, making great DAC replacements (cheaper+thinner replaceable cabling). They run great, I've had 8 going for a year. Even if all 8 failed tomorrow and I bought 8 more that's still cheaper than a single 100G SR4 from FS. You can pair these with used 100G NICs for ~$100, making a 100G direct connection between 2 machines ~$250 after shipping+tax.
For high speed home stuff, I usually pick up some old Mellanox infiniband cards and cables. They're usually dirt cheap and insanely quick. Difficult to work with if you do not know what your are doing.
They're dramatically less expensive than original OEM, but UB clearly is targeting them with this release/aggressive pricing.
It remains to be seen if UB's pricing (particularly $50 on the "Wizard") is just temp to get their foot in the door. I suspect it is; and we'll see the price increase later.
Cisco etc have truly insane pricing on optics, like $1000 for something generic that cost $20-50 from fs.com etc. The only difference is how it presents itself to the switch (ie, says its a Cisco optic), not actual difference in performance.
Often Cisco/etc will refuse support cases if you aren't using their optics, if the switches/routers even work with them in the first case, which isn't a given as often they'll refuse to work with non branded optics.
Really just a money grab by the big network vendors.
This box allows you to flash the firmware on the optic to say its from whatever brand you want (Cisco, Dell, Aruba, Juniper etc) so that you can get it to work in that companies switch/router.
For most SMEs, the brand of optics makes no difference. Maybe keep a few legit branded ones around for debugging and when you need to raise a support case. But otherwise, the generic ones flashed to look like branded ones work just fine.
"The only difference is how it presents itself to the switch (ie, says its a Cisco optic), not actual difference in performance."
That's not necessarily the only difference. I have had situations where I ran equivalent optics side-by-side, and then touched one and it was hot, and touched the other and it was not hot. They do contain different components. In the case of that test - the atgbics SFP was cool, and the other clone unit was hot. My dealer was able to get me in contact with someone technical in atgbics (the cool-running unit) who explained the difference, "The DSP might be say 13nm where more modern more expensive ones are 5nm."
But you definitely do not need to pay for "genuine" optics to get high-reliability optics. You just need to shop around the clones - atgbics is a clone.
I've only been using it for a couple months, but OPNsense (FreeBSD based) is such a solid piece of software. I installed it on a cheap Beelink mini PC with dual 2.5 gb NICs and an N150 processor (model EQ14), and it's been reliable and a pleasure to use as my router. I have a TP-Link Omada setup which I've been pleased with, but I feel no need to purchase one of their gateways.
What do you use for OpenBSD hardware? Is it power hungry? Is it performant?
I had a great stint with OpenBSD on an older Pentium 4 Dell tower a few years back. For basic firewall rules, I had line-rate performance on my NICs. But for a home network I'd love to have something more energy efficient.
Search Amazon for "pfsense mini pc". (smile as you think about how this triggers that one pfsense guy!) Intel N100 or N150 processor, passive cooling, typically 5 1000GBASE-T or better ports, RAM and SSD included. Should be able to get one for ~$200.
My current router at home is a dell vostro 3020 with a quad port intel nic. I usually get dell for the firmware updates they provide well after warranty.
The same excitement I used to feel in the late '00s/early '10s for Apple is what I now feel for Unifi. I must have it all. They are capitalizing on autism better than anyone else in the history of the world, except for maybe Lego.
Which, while it works, is the poster child for how NOT to develop desktop software as it's a really shitty .NET GUI app they shoehorned onto non-Windows platforms.
Anybody go through the trouble of outfitting their entire home/condo with fiber? Probably overkill for residential but I am also thinking it might need to be shrouded in EMT conduit
I did a 10 gig backbone between my three switches, and it's awesome. I didn't bother placing conduit - just tacked up preterminated lengths using coax clips and ordered a spare in case one of them ever goes down. I also have Wi-Fi mesh routers on each switch, which provides low speed redundancy until I have time to replace a fiber. I considered doing conduit - mostly I didn't because I don't expect to be in this house for too many more years. I don't know that I would run fiber to many more places - I did place a jumper through the wall for my wife's desktop if we wanted that in the future. But most consumer devices still seem to have rj45s, so I wouldn't want to put down a media converter for each. If this were a new build I might consider placing fiber and only lighting it as needed.
This is the SFP DAS and fiber links in the current place:
workstation - switchUpStairs - switchMainFloor - switchBasement - nas
Edge devices are a mix between 100meg, 1gig, 2.5gig, so anything wired is limited mostly by its own nic or the ISP.
Because pre-terminated cable assemblies [0] can be 10% of the cost of a more modular link, I used conduit large enough to pass QSFP28 with ease. May not be possible in every home but I'm happy with the result.
some context that's perhaps not obvious to non-networking people: essentially all networking hardware above 1G doesn't have rj45 or fibre ports in it, it has holes that you put modules in, "SFP+" modules for 10G, "SFP28" for 28gig networking, etc.
most manufacturers of devices - the things with the holes, NICs, switches, routers - make their devices only officially work with modules that claim to be manufactured by that same manufacturer. so, you can either buy modules from that manufacturer, or buy modules from some other company (e.g. fs.com, 10gtek) who programs the modules to claim that they are from that manufacturer. "officially" can mean anything from "we won't help you if you open a support case" to "the device will make a whiney log message on boot if it's not one of our modules" to "it simply doesn't work unless you hack an EEPROM on the device".
this is somewhat annoying, since it means you need to buy specific modules for specific devices, you can't just keep a pile of SFP+ 10G-LR modules around, you need some "Intel SFP+ 10G-LR" and some "Cisco SFP+ 10G-LR", etc.
so, these third party manufacturers of the modules, like fs.com and 10gtek, will also sell you programmers for the modules, which lets you change what manufacturer the module claims made it. these programmers have been, historically and hilariously, tied to the actual manufacturer of the modules! so you can buy some 10G-LR SFP+ modules from fs.com and a fs.com programmer to set make some "Intel" and some "Cisco", but if you buy some 10gtek 10G-LR modules, you would need to buy a 10gtek programmer.
~so, this device that Ubiquiti has made is the meta-programmer - it can apparently program any module, from any actual manufacturer, to claim to be made by any manufacturer.~
edit: the post seems deliberately confusing - what they are actually selling is a device that can re-program Ubiquiti SFP+ modules by copying the manufacturer code from another SFP+ module that you insert into the programmer. so it's the same as what fs.com and all the other sell, but Ubiquiti's is ~1/10th the price (e.g. https://www.fs.com/uk/c/fs-box-3389).
Minor pedantic correction: 2.5gbit, 5gbit and 10gbit RJ45 is getting more affordable and more common, and for short runs should run over CAT 6 and CAT 6a fine, and plenty of reports it does ok on short runs even on CAT 5e. With devices like the USW Flex Mini 2.5 at ~50-60 EUR / USD, you can affordably outfit your home for higher than gigabit speeds without rewiring everything with new CAT cable or fiber.
Over here in NL we now get more and more access to >1gbps speeds, the office of my small business for instance has a 4gbps connection, and the ISP offers up to 8gbps on a standard consumer / small business package. We're in the process of upgrading our gear to take advantage of that. With WiFi 7 we've seen some real world throughput speeds of 1800-2000mbps going through a Ubiquiti U7 Pro straight to the ISP supplied router.
I wasn't really keeping up with networking gear, so I was pleasantly surprised when I looked into this stuff recently and figured out the gear has just magically gotten better and running 2.5gbit everywhere is surprisingly easy.
For those outside the IT/networking realms, SFP use uniform connectors for both the networking device and the fiber cable, but the major vendors (Cisco and friends) have used firmware flags and settings to provide vendor lock-in for at least the last 15 years.
It used to be that in the event of a major outage or hardware failure you would need to issue additional debug commands to the effect of "I know this isn't your approved SFP but please just try it," if you were trying to replace a first party SFP with a third party one. TAC would more or less laugh at you and hang up if you sought support.
I'm not sure if this product will _actually_ change any of that, but here's hoping.
> TAC would more or less laugh at you and hang up if you sought support.
This is common belief and even a dire warning when filing TAC tickets. However, unless the third-party SFP is the prime suspect, I have never experienced a TAC from any major networking vendor[1] refuse support, let alone "laugh and hang up," even metaphorically.
It's good SOP to keep at least a couple SFPs for each networking manufacturer on the shelf, but third-party SFPs are normally in the ballpark of 10% of the cost of OEM and tend to be manufactured better[2].
1. Mostly Cisco, Juniper, HPE, Fortinet
2. I've had a far greater failure rate on OEM SFPs than SFPs from third-parties like Fs.com and USCritical. That and they feel much less flimsy than OEM.
Before I comment, a disclaimer about my small scale. I have probably three hundred SFPs running, and less than five years of experience with optics. I don't have stock tracking for the individual manufacturers, and the failure rate comments here are based on gut-feel only. (there will be other people here used to far larger scales)
I bucket it into there being three options: genuine, clone, and good-clone.
We had a bad run with fs.com QSFP+s. Their SFPs have been better to me, but reckon I have had a couple fail.
Atgbics SFP+s to be a reliable supplier for us. I don't think I have had any of those fail, and they have been my main vendor for a while now. You can order them programmed with personalities for Cisco, etc.
Part of the edge of fs.com is that it is so easy to place an order and get fast delivery. My site is in another country from where I live, and I do a few trips a year. Several times they have made low-notice projects possible.
>I'm not sure if this product will _actually_ change any of that, but here's hoping.
SFP programmers have been around forever and work great. This will solve the issue. The only really unique thing here is the form factor and price. I think the last time I looked at a programmer 8 years ago I seem to recall it was about 10x this price. I’m guessing cheaper ones have popped up out of China since then.
Early this year I started redoing the backbone of my home network with 10 gb. Some of it's fiber, some of it's 10 gb copper Ethernet. It's been genuinely frustrating the weird incompatibilities between switches and SFP+ modules.
All my switches are MikroTik. My SFP+ modules are MikroTik, Ubiquiti, and some 3rd party ones from before I knew better.
I've had modules that will only run at gigabit in one switch but will give me the full 10 gb in another. I've had modules that refuse to work in one MikroTik switch but will happily work in a different MikroTik switch. I've just had a world of pain.
I've got everything basically working after months of fiddling and I'm inclined to just not… touch… anything.
I've had great luck with 10gtek modules both with Mikrotik gear, with DACs, and one that is connected to an upstream juniper switch. I'm curious what modules were the most troublesom.
* I will note that the 10gb sfp+ modules from 10gtek on a Mikrotik just don't work.
Funnily enough, this 10gtek worked on one of my 3 switches, but I could only establish a gigabit connection. I returned it [1]
These 10gtek fiber modules on the other hand have worked flawlessly so far. [2]
This Mikrotik module would not establish a 10 gb link with my Thunderbolt dock no matter what I tried. Works fine with my servers though so I swapped it out.
I've pretty much resigned myself to just buying the full brand Ubiqitui SFP+ adapters [4] for converting to copper.
I recently purchased [5] to run to my living room, but I have not found the time/energy to do the run.
1. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KFBFL16
2. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BP4M8LV
3. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078SNK1MY
4. https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/accessories-modules-fibe...
5. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CYC6P6KF
This is not for me as I'm not a professional network engineer, but I do want to say that Ubiquiti has made home networking SO fun for me. Everything truly "Just Works."
My setup is definitely more on the prosumer side, but it's been so build out and inspect my network with their tools.
Tangentially related: is Mikrotik as bad for wireless as some say? I want to like them, even though their equipment seems complex, I root for a company from the Baltics that have carved out a respectable niche. But they appear to struggle with wireless?
Can someone explain what "just works" when compared to other networking gear? IE I use ASUS and their mesh, and it all "just works". Have a mix of routers over 10 years and they all mesh together.
For a start I wouldn’t trust brands that by default market mesh over wired backhaul.
This is exactly how it is for me too. Everything truly "just worked" - except Sonos, but that's not a Unifi problem - they even have a dedicated page in their docs on how to set up Sonos systems, which I followed exactly, and it now works a treat.
Do you think it'd be worth upgrading over TP Link Omada hardware?
I made the switch to Ubiquiti from TP Link last year. 1000% worth it. The "Just Works (tm)" thing is true, but the ceiling of what you can do with it is so much higher. I'll also say that the Unifi nerds out there are legion and you can find support and comment threads all over the place for pretty much any project you want to do.
All the complaints about Ubiquiti in this thread from a few months ago dissuaded me from investing in their gear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746603
I ended up going with TP-Link Omada and have been happy so far (a managed switch and wifi 6 WAPs). I am a bit concerned about their security track record given how bad their soho products are, so I ended up sticking with my opnsense router at the perimeter as the first line of defense.
I’m curious to hear what you think you’re missing out on with Omada.
I made the same conclusions but got burned with Omada. Cheaper, yes, but fewer features and buggier than Unifi (and that’s a pretty low bar). I migrated back to Unifi.
I don't think I've run into any bugs, but there are also entire sections of the controller I haven't explored yet. I have a pretty typical homelab style setup with multiple wifi SSIDs for trusted devices and untrusted devices, and several VLANs to isolate them. I guess it's good to know rumors of Ubiquiti's death have been greatly exaggerated in case my Omada hardware starts acting up.
The two biggest complaints in that thread (Edgerouter support abandoned, and VLAN issue unacknowledged and unfixed) were both wrong. Overall, it is a great, easy, inexpensive set of products.
I've used both and was super interested to use Omada because of its price and performance. Honestly, Ubiquiti is just so much easier. The whole controller model for Omada tries to be way more "enterprisey" at the cost of a SOHO ease of use.
I don’t know about it "just works." Still have to perform a monthly reboot of equipment otherwise performance kind of drops off.
Still 100X better than the competition though. My UDM has worked wonderfully with support for dual IPs and seamless failover
FiberStore (fs.com) have offered vendor neutral and reprogrammable SFPs and other modules for years (they're also dramatically less expensive).
> (they're also dramatically less expensive)
It depends, but for typical networking I'd say Ubiquti is actually offering better pricing here (outside of 10G LR) - and I'm saying that as someone who has sold 10s of thousands of FS modules to customers.
Note: Prices in () are the non-marked down limited time prices.Side note for the HN crown: For ridiculous homelab 100G shenanigans look for Intel 100G-CWDM4 on sites like Ebay. They go for $4 a piece and work with SM LC fiber from 0-2000 meter runs, making great DAC replacements (cheaper+thinner replaceable cabling). They run great, I've had 8 going for a year. Even if all 8 failed tomorrow and I bought 8 more that's still cheaper than a single 100G SR4 from FS. You can pair these with used 100G NICs for ~$100, making a 100G direct connection between 2 machines ~$250 after shipping+tax.
For high speed home stuff, I usually pick up some old Mellanox infiniband cards and cables. They're usually dirt cheap and insanely quick. Difficult to work with if you do not know what your are doing.
Fun fact: each one also consumes approximately $4 in electricity per year.
Assuming 2.5W typical consumption, $0.18/kWh rate. More like $8/year if you are in a high rate area!
They're dramatically less expensive than original OEM, but UB clearly is targeting them with this release/aggressive pricing.
It remains to be seen if UB's pricing (particularly $50 on the "Wizard") is just temp to get their foot in the door. I suspect it is; and we'll see the price increase later.
And if you shove the wrong (i.e. non-FS) optic in an FS Box you accidentally softlock your account for a week at a time as a punishment :)
I love this. However, I'm very interested to see the maths on "offering up to 1000% savings compared to industry standards"
Cisco etc have truly insane pricing on optics, like $1000 for something generic that cost $20-50 from fs.com etc. The only difference is how it presents itself to the switch (ie, says its a Cisco optic), not actual difference in performance.
Often Cisco/etc will refuse support cases if you aren't using their optics, if the switches/routers even work with them in the first case, which isn't a given as often they'll refuse to work with non branded optics.
Really just a money grab by the big network vendors.
This box allows you to flash the firmware on the optic to say its from whatever brand you want (Cisco, Dell, Aruba, Juniper etc) so that you can get it to work in that companies switch/router.
For most SMEs, the brand of optics makes no difference. Maybe keep a few legit branded ones around for debugging and when you need to raise a support case. But otherwise, the generic ones flashed to look like branded ones work just fine.
"The only difference is how it presents itself to the switch (ie, says its a Cisco optic), not actual difference in performance."
That's not necessarily the only difference. I have had situations where I ran equivalent optics side-by-side, and then touched one and it was hot, and touched the other and it was not hot. They do contain different components. In the case of that test - the atgbics SFP was cool, and the other clone unit was hot. My dealer was able to get me in contact with someone technical in atgbics (the cool-running unit) who explained the difference, "The DSP might be say 13nm where more modern more expensive ones are 5nm."
But you definitely do not need to pay for "genuine" optics to get high-reliability optics. You just need to shop around the clones - atgbics is a clone.
It’s simple, they pay you 9X the standard industry price for each one you take…?
The more you buy the more you save
infinite money glitch
Isn't this exactly the same as flexoptix and FS have been doing for years?
Ubiquiti doesn't invent anything; they make it cheap with a better UI.
Better UI is stretching it a bit... Maybe for the amateur/enthusiast (homelab) market...
The UI for the fs.com programmer is merely "not bad". This could easily be great in comparison.
That’s their exact niche.
Ubiquiti is awesome, but their IPv6 support leaves something to be desired.
I have two ISPs, one with IPv6 (Starlink) and one without (Frontier).
I want to use Frontier for all IPv4, with IPv4 failover to Starlink, and I want to use Starlink only for IPv6.
UniFi networking won’t let you configure this, and I’m not going to SSH in to my UDM to manually set routes, that will be lost at next boot.
This is why my router isn’t ubiquiti. I like the switches and access points but my router will stay an OpenBSD box.
I've only been using it for a couple months, but OPNsense (FreeBSD based) is such a solid piece of software. I installed it on a cheap Beelink mini PC with dual 2.5 gb NICs and an N150 processor (model EQ14), and it's been reliable and a pleasure to use as my router. I have a TP-Link Omada setup which I've been pleased with, but I feel no need to purchase one of their gateways.
What do you use for OpenBSD hardware? Is it power hungry? Is it performant?
I had a great stint with OpenBSD on an older Pentium 4 Dell tower a few years back. For basic firewall rules, I had line-rate performance on my NICs. But for a home network I'd love to have something more energy efficient.
Search Amazon for "pfsense mini pc". (smile as you think about how this triggers that one pfsense guy!) Intel N100 or N150 processor, passive cooling, typically 5 1000GBASE-T or better ports, RAM and SSD included. Should be able to get one for ~$200.
My current router at home is a dell vostro 3020 with a quad port intel nic. I usually get dell for the firmware updates they provide well after warranty.
Should put in feature request, I would happily upvote/support something like this on their community forum.
Looks cool but their text on that page is very clearly written by LLM and pretty exhausting to read.
This will make the life soo easy for many
The same excitement I used to feel in the late '00s/early '10s for Apple is what I now feel for Unifi. I must have it all. They are capitalizing on autism better than anyone else in the history of the world, except for maybe Lego.
Way more affordable than other solutions, like the $370 FS BOX from fs.com:
https://www.fs.com/products/96657.html
Which, while it works, is the poster child for how NOT to develop desktop software as it's a really shitty .NET GUI app they shoehorned onto non-Windows platforms.
Anybody go through the trouble of outfitting their entire home/condo with fiber? Probably overkill for residential but I am also thinking it might need to be shrouded in EMT conduit
I did a 10 gig backbone between my three switches, and it's awesome. I didn't bother placing conduit - just tacked up preterminated lengths using coax clips and ordered a spare in case one of them ever goes down. I also have Wi-Fi mesh routers on each switch, which provides low speed redundancy until I have time to replace a fiber. I considered doing conduit - mostly I didn't because I don't expect to be in this house for too many more years. I don't know that I would run fiber to many more places - I did place a jumper through the wall for my wife's desktop if we wanted that in the future. But most consumer devices still seem to have rj45s, so I wouldn't want to put down a media converter for each. If this were a new build I might consider placing fiber and only lighting it as needed.
This is the SFP DAS and fiber links in the current place:
workstation - switchUpStairs - switchMainFloor - switchBasement - nas
Edge devices are a mix between 100meg, 1gig, 2.5gig, so anything wired is limited mostly by its own nic or the ISP.
I ran conduit for fiber to a couple rooms.
Because pre-terminated cable assemblies [0] can be 10% of the cost of a more modular link, I used conduit large enough to pass QSFP28 with ease. May not be possible in every home but I'm happy with the result.
[0]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/116804914246
Most innovative and disruptive (and generally just profoundly interesting) company that hardly anyone knows about in the grand scheme of things.
some context that's perhaps not obvious to non-networking people: essentially all networking hardware above 1G doesn't have rj45 or fibre ports in it, it has holes that you put modules in, "SFP+" modules for 10G, "SFP28" for 28gig networking, etc.
most manufacturers of devices - the things with the holes, NICs, switches, routers - make their devices only officially work with modules that claim to be manufactured by that same manufacturer. so, you can either buy modules from that manufacturer, or buy modules from some other company (e.g. fs.com, 10gtek) who programs the modules to claim that they are from that manufacturer. "officially" can mean anything from "we won't help you if you open a support case" to "the device will make a whiney log message on boot if it's not one of our modules" to "it simply doesn't work unless you hack an EEPROM on the device".
this is somewhat annoying, since it means you need to buy specific modules for specific devices, you can't just keep a pile of SFP+ 10G-LR modules around, you need some "Intel SFP+ 10G-LR" and some "Cisco SFP+ 10G-LR", etc.
so, these third party manufacturers of the modules, like fs.com and 10gtek, will also sell you programmers for the modules, which lets you change what manufacturer the module claims made it. these programmers have been, historically and hilariously, tied to the actual manufacturer of the modules! so you can buy some 10G-LR SFP+ modules from fs.com and a fs.com programmer to set make some "Intel" and some "Cisco", but if you buy some 10gtek 10G-LR modules, you would need to buy a 10gtek programmer.
~so, this device that Ubiquiti has made is the meta-programmer - it can apparently program any module, from any actual manufacturer, to claim to be made by any manufacturer.~
edit: the post seems deliberately confusing - what they are actually selling is a device that can re-program Ubiquiti SFP+ modules by copying the manufacturer code from another SFP+ module that you insert into the programmer. so it's the same as what fs.com and all the other sell, but Ubiquiti's is ~1/10th the price (e.g. https://www.fs.com/uk/c/fs-box-3389).
Minor pedantic correction: 2.5gbit, 5gbit and 10gbit RJ45 is getting more affordable and more common, and for short runs should run over CAT 6 and CAT 6a fine, and plenty of reports it does ok on short runs even on CAT 5e. With devices like the USW Flex Mini 2.5 at ~50-60 EUR / USD, you can affordably outfit your home for higher than gigabit speeds without rewiring everything with new CAT cable or fiber.
Over here in NL we now get more and more access to >1gbps speeds, the office of my small business for instance has a 4gbps connection, and the ISP offers up to 8gbps on a standard consumer / small business package. We're in the process of upgrading our gear to take advantage of that. With WiFi 7 we've seen some real world throughput speeds of 1800-2000mbps going through a Ubiquiti U7 Pro straight to the ISP supplied router.
I wasn't really keeping up with networking gear, so I was pleasantly surprised when I looked into this stuff recently and figured out the gear has just magically gotten better and running 2.5gbit everywhere is surprisingly easy.