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TP-Link Omada or Ubiquiti Unifi?
Update: what I think I'm going with... anything I should add or swap out?
Tl;dr: which would you choose, and why?
I'm looking to up my home networking game. For years I've rocked just a cable modem and wi-fi router. I recently bought my first NAS to set up Jellyfin, and fell down the homelab rabbit hole :-)
I have 300Mb/s cable internet, and discovered it's actully delivering ~370Mb/s. Unfortunately my wi-fi performance was degraded to only ~40Mb/s in the office (via AP1 -> AP2 -> base wi-fi router). Restarting the mesh wi-fi router / APs got that up to 90Mb/s in the office, and ~145Mb/s on my phone near the router (so no hops through the APs).
The NAS has 10GbE as well as Thunderbolt 4 (good for up to 40Gb I believe). The only place I can plug it into my network is in the living room, where the wi-fi router lives (as that's where the cable comes in). That means I can't take advantage of the Thunderbolt port, as my computer lives in the office :-(
So I'm looking to to run two Cat6 lines from the office (upstairs) into the attic, down an interior wall into the crawlspace, then up the exterior wall into the living room. One line will be the uplink to the cable modem from a router in the office, and the other a 10Gb downlink to a sub-router in the LR for the TV, stereo, Apple 4k, etc network through.
I plan to buy a rackable router with 1GbE WAN (I don't expect to ever need/want a faster internet connection than that) and at least a couple of 10GbE SFP+ ports; in the future I may want to add a PoE capable switch, more Cat6 lines for security cameras and network drops to other locations in the house, a patch panel and cable management solution if/when I get enough lines installed to warrant it, maybe one or more rackable servers as I get more into the whole homelab thing :-) and so on. And of course a new wi-fi AP.
Unifi seems to be popular, but more expensive; Omada looks pretty comparable, and more affordable. I work for a subsidiary of Cisco, so I also looked at Meraki, but it looks like that gets way more pricey.
Any other options I should look at? What equipment would you recommend?
Don't get omada if you want updates. I had 2 eap620 v1 AP. I contacted them because that version hadn't received firmware updates since 2022. I was told the hardware can't support the new features" which is bullshit. I looked it up and the chips in the v1 are a higher end model than the V2 or v3. They just didn't want to build a separate firmware and have to test it. They told me an RMA was not possible without a software issue. And not getting updates didn't count.
Well it turns out they advertise quite a few features for the v1 that are still not possible. Band steering, protected management frames, and bandwidth limits. Funny thing. Wpa3 requires protected frames to be available to be able to say the it has wpa3. Since June 2021. The v1 didn't even go through fcc approvelal until December 2021. I had to argue quite a bit do a lot of digging And prove the features weren't available. If I didn't have the knowledge to argue my points they would have denied me. In the end I received 2 v3 versions under RMA. I will remove all of them as soon as I have money to.
Omada does not support their products for long and blatantly lie about features and even specifications that their equipment have.
I'm not a huge fan of unifi either. Their firmware is pretty buggy. But omada is garbage. And I wanted omada to be good.
Good to know the product support isn't there for Omada. That's too bad :-(
UBNT is fine; I've only used their older products, YMMV.
I have (and still use) an ER-Lite. It shifts data fine, but the storage died (known problem, they had an internal USB port with some low-quality flash drives to store the system software), and the solution only came when I hooked up to the console port and read the errors as they came out. A problem that bricks the device and can only be fixed by someone who knows to how use a professional method (I'm not a pro, but I know enough to use some of their tools badly) to figure it out? Not good. It was never marketed to consumers, to be fair, but that should have generated a recall. However, it was cheap, so...
My current WiFi is Omada. The controller software isn't quite as straightforward as UBNT (tried their stuff, but it had terrible signal through my walls - don't know whose problem that was, but I would be ten feet away from an AP and have no signal if a wall was in the way, while my Omada devices don't have that problem but were also much more recent designs when installed). However, once it's set up, it's very easy.
So: I use mostly Omada (and I have a router to replace my ancient ER-L, but need a wife-free, no-work weekend to make sure it's up to snuff before I can replace a fully functional device for one that is better but might not work right away), but I don't think there's a huge reason to choose one over the other.
As a follow-up question on this topic, how do they compare in terms of frequency of firmware updates and attention to security flaws/patches?
The US is considering banning TP-Link from the country
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/us-ban-china-router-tp-link-systems-7d7507e6?st=SEX5iL&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
This is almost a religious debate at this point. I played with both, stayed with Omada. Run a 10gig router and infrastructure with multiple APs.
Looks like I'm going with Ubiquiti :-) Anything I should add? I'm not including a UPS / backup power solution, as I have an existing UPS the rack can plug into. I'm also not including provision for a 10GbE downlink to the LR; I'll spend the extra $65 if a 1GbE link proves insufficient.
I had ubiquiti gear and pulled it all and replaced it with tp- link last year. Lower prices, virtually same software, easy to get hardware were my reasons. It all started when my usg died after several years, and there was no supply of new ones.
Having used both for similar use cases
Ubiquiti was cleaner on the controller compared to TP-Link Omada
In the case of Omada, there was a bigger learning curve to it, as there are fewer resources available for it.
If you understand network fundamentals, both will perform similarly once you understand the controller.
My main issue was that Ubiquiti cost notably more for the same solution. (In my case 1 PoE managed switch and a couple of APs, my router is an OPNSense firewall I built)