[lug] wireless router or access point suggestions

[Stephen Queen]

I just wanted to comment on Ubiquiti products. I've had some experience
with 3 of their products.
We bought a large number of their XR2 Radio Module for use in a number of
applications. I never had any issues with these, and was pleased with their
performance. I'm not sure if these are still in production or not. But they
can still be purchased.
We purchased in excess of over 200 of their Router Stations. This was one
of the applications for the XR2. This product is now out of production and
can't be purchased anymore. The quality of the actual hardware was very
disappointing.We were using them in a battery powered application and
needed to reboot them daily. We used them 40-50 at a time. Each day at
least 10% of the routers had to be rebooted a number of times to get them
up. When I contacted their support about this issue, they referred me to
their users mailing list. That was all the help I got from them. Another
glitch with these was a thermal issue. They came with a heat sink mounted
on one of the chips on the Printed Circuit Board (PCB). This heat sink was
not mounted in a very reliable manner and tended to come lose. We went
through all of our boards and modified these so they wouldn't come loose.
I also bought roughly 6 or 7 of their bullets. What I found was that they
had used a very cheap RJ-45 connector on these, and that the RJ-45 on the
cable would just fall out at very inconvenient times.
I liked the idea behind their products. I just didn't think much of their
implementation.
In an office environment where they are not touched by anyone, they may
perform quite well. But if people are moving them from office to office,
the cheap implementation may come to the surface.

I recently started replacing the Router Stations with a product from a
company named Gateworks. The feel of the quality was much better than that
from Ubiquiti. The problem was the price was about 2.5 X greater than the
product I bought from Ubiquiti.

My $0.02
Steve

On Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 8:23 AM, Logan Garbarini <logangarbarini at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Steve,
>
> I’d recommend any of Ubiquiti’s products, especially their “Enterprise”
> offerings. https://www.ubnt.com/enterprise/
> Their Unifi APs have all your requirements. They also easily handle well
> over 50 clients, something I can’t say about other APs.
>
> The one down side is they need a java controller software to set up which
> is a pain on Ubuntu (easier on Windows :/), but then it allows you to
> configure as many APs as you want which is really nice.
>
> If you’re looking for a more traditional AP, I’ve heard good things about
> EnGenius products, but can’t claim to have used them.
>
> Cheers,
> Logan
>
> On July 30, 2015 at 3:14:06 PM, Steve A Hart (shart at colorado.edu) wrote:
>
> I'm looking to put a wireless router or wireless access point into a
> small conference room.  As not to interfere with the CU Boulder wireless
> setup, I need to have the following available in the device.
>
> - Must use the 5 GHz channel
> - Ability to turn off the 2.4GHz channel
> - Ability to control the power in terms of how far it reaches.
>
> Any suggestions on makes and models would be appreciated.
>
> Cheers
>
> Steve
>
> --
> Steve Hart
> Systems Administrator
> Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research
> University of Colorado BoulderSteven.Hart at colorado.edu(303)492-8109
>
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