“Almost everyone has a story about their crappy home Wi-Fi connection, usually relating to a particular house they lived in with an obscure shape. It’s a nightmare when you know your connection is great, but you can’t get the speeds you’re paying for everywhere,” Owen Williams writes for TNW. “Until recently, I was one of those people that constantly complained about the bad Wi-Fi at the back of my house. If I owned the place, I’d drill a hole in the wall and run a cable, or put it in the roof, but as a renter you only have so many options.”
“I’d tried everything I can, like Powerline network adapters, stronger access points and extenders but nothing seemed to work properly – one end of the house was always unstable and slow,” Williams writes. “When Eero announced its wireless mesh offering, which automatically pairs multiple access points together to create a beautifully-fast network across your home, I was excited to finally fix my internet… but it’s US-only and surprisingly expensive at $349 for just two access points.”
“Then I stumbled across Ubiquiti. You’ve probably never heard of them, but they’re making some of the most interesting wireless equipment out there for a sheer fraction of the cost,” Williams writes. “Ubiquiti’s AC Lite costs just [$78.98], which sports AC wireless – compare that to the price of Apple’s Airport Extreme at $199 and you can get two while still saving money. The hardware is sleek and tidy, but no frills: just one ethernet port and that’s it… The reason you’ve never heard of Ubiquiti is because they’re an enterprise company – so they don’t market to consumers like you and me.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Not as easy as plopping additional Apple Airport devices around the house, but certainly cheaper. Hey, if you’ve got the time and the inclination to set it all up, to each his own.
We use ubiquiti access points at the office, and they work incredibly well. But I’d never use them at home, at home it’s 3 AirPort Extreme’s + 2 power line adapters for the garage where there’s a lot of interference, it works very well. all tied an arris SB6190 modem and a gigabit connection. The only real issue at home is that the fastest device on the network can only run at 866 wirelessly so typical speeds are about 480-620 Mbps, which is great, but it would be nice to have some 1.3 Gbps AC chips inside of iOS devices and MacBooks.
The difference is that it took me about 20 Minutes to set up our entire home network with all of that stuff, but it took a ubiquiti engineer a full day and a half at our office to get things running. Their new home solution I’m interested in trying though, because it promises a lot of throughput. But the AirPort Extreme’s are so simple to set up and not worry about it may not be worth the switch.
I have had a Cisco valet plus installed for years. I have a long ranch style house. The Cisco is installed at the far end of the house. I get very good service in the garage at the other end of the house as well as in the far end of the basement which has several heating duct in the ceiling.
Asus RT-N66U Dark Knight. Never had a problem with it.
I use the same hardware, ASUS RT-N66U but I’ve flashed dd-wrt onto it. A combination a OpenDNS, DNSMasq, and DynDNS gives me a great security and filtering solution for all devices in the home without a monthly subscription.
If the hardware has issues, just buy a new one. I had a problem with a unit and had to send it back to them. They first time they didn’t fix the problem, even though their rep asked how to reproduce the problem step by step. I had to send it back again and included the instructions in the box and they just finally sent me a new one. It was 2 full months from when it broke to when they sent a replacement and a week until I received the unit back. I’d never buy their stuff again.
Agree with the airport, but they were last updated 3 years ago and there have been some changes to wireless protocols etc. Will we be seeing an updated Airport extreme in the coming weeks?
Apple seems like it sometimes forhets that it makes a whole range of products…. 3 Yrs without update is not Apple like…
Correction: 3 years without an update would not be very Jobs-like. It is par for the course for Cook.
Not true. The original airport was around for 4 years. The n models were 2 years each then the ac model arrived.
The Express went 4 years before they released an n model and another 4 until the current model, which was 4 years ago.
Ubiquiti Rocks. Make the change over and you’ll never be happier. I dumped all my Apple wifi. Got an edge router X and to Unifi AP lites and have been problem free for over a year. No degrading speeds, not drop outs, no restarts. 100% uptime.
The QOS feature in the Edge Router X is worth it. How apple can charge over $200 for a router and not have QOS is amazing.
Even my cheap $40 Buffalo router with DD-WRT on it it had QOS.
Not to mention the Airport Express STILL is not 802.11ac.
The artical does not cover what he is using for a network router. For those of you using Ubiquiti access points and the Cloud Key, what are you using for your router?
I use their security gateway. Works really well. I can manage everything from their web portal, my AC pro and router.
I use an edge Router X
Currently having this weird problem of the WiFi cutting in & out while listening to IHeartRadio on my Apple 6 Plus.A problem I never had before. I have two Apple Extreme stations (one upstairs and an extended one downstairs) but both a little long in the tooth but should be adequate. Downstairs iMac has dog slow WiFi that is kind of okay and then glacial. So I don’t know what the problem is exactly. I believe it’s automatically supposed to find the best channels to operate from and I’ve done everything (reboot, turn things on & off) to make it better to little change effect.
I’ll be interested in any new Airport devices in the (near) future. It would be nice to get the kind of speeds we see in every Apple Store. I’m certainly paying for it.
I had something similar happen with my old AirPort Extreme base station. It may have started when I applied the “surprise” firmware update a few months ago. In AirPort Utility, there’s a command to reset it to default. I did that, and set it up again like before. Works like new again! 🙂
Thanks, maybe I should try that. Today I put the downstairs WiFi Airport station in my wife’s downstairs office and connected directly Ethernet at the box. Working much better. She has a 2009 iMac that has reached the end of the OS upgrading road with El Capitan.
I had your EXACT problems with my Apple wifi.
My first solution was to dump the apple gear and went to Buffalo routers with DD-WRT on it. Much better solution, but it was a clunky install where I had to access mulitple routers to manage them, but still SO much better then apple hardware.
Then I went to Ubiquiti and all my troubles ended. No more slow downs out of the blue requiring restarts, no dropped connections , no failure to connect errors. No nothing.
100% uptime and I get my full 100mbps speed from my ISP. Plus the ubiquiti was far cheaper then apple. I’m now a customer for life.
That’s good to know since solutions other Apple are usually crap. Which model did you go with? Thanks!
Speaking of “crappy” hardware, my service provider’s recent cable modem has a built-in wireless router. I planned to retire my very old AirPort Extreme base station; it’s the first square one with 802.11.n. But the cable modem’s built-in wireless sucks, slow and unreliable. I’m suspicious this is intentional, to lower customer bandwidth usage.
I ended up connecting that old AirPort Extreme to cable modem with Ethernet wire. It now uses fastest possible wireless settings (instead of most compatible) for my recent Mac, Apple TV, and iOS devices. The cable modem’s built-in wireless works OK for my older slower devices. So I have a makeshift “dual band” setup that works great.
I appreciate the long-term value of my old AirPort Extreme base station. It even received a recent firmware update from Apple, after all these years.
My house is 100ft long, so I use an Airport Extreme, in the middle, and two ActionTec power line adapters, that also have wifi, in addition to ethernet connectors. That allows my TCL Roku tvs to connect since they don’t have ethernet ports. Testing shows I get the max throughput my cable provider sells me.
Once again, Apple’s Airports are no better than any other company’s product. The software is better for Macs, but the same limitations apply.
I think it’s very important to give hackers as much bandwidth to your home or condo as possible.
I am on an Airport Extreme dual band with improved antenna, which I think is the current shipping model. Like every previous version of the Apple base stations it has proven highly reliable, easy to set up and long lived.
My time with Apple AirPorts goes back to the first white UFO models and all have been well worth the money.
If any Apple staff are lurking, how about an Apple HotSpot that we can use for mobile data and control with Apple’s software on our devices. With Apple now on the iPhone 7, they have significant knowledge and skill with LTE phones and making a great mobile AirPort would be an easy thing to do that would probably sell well.
I use APE’s at home and work, and aside from occasionally having to power cycle once in a great while ( as almost every router needs now and then) they have performed flawlessly.
I’ve made the move over to Ubiquiti last year and never going back to crappy Apple wifi. I have had many Apple Airports and expresses over the years. Besides being crazy expensive, they required frequent restarts, drops outs, won’t connects, etc, etc.
So off to Ubiqiuti I went after a year with Buffalo and DD-WRT, which were cheap and worked better then Apple hardware, but I wanted a sleeker install with better coverage.
My transition over to Ubiquiti was cost effective and very simple. I installed an Edge Router X, which does ONLY routing and does it well with more options then an Apple router. I installed 2 Unifi AP lite and now I have flawless internet all over my large house. Can max out my internet connection anywhere inside or out on my porches. Have done ZERO router restarts in over a year, no dropped connections, no sluggish performance, no problems at all. 100% uptime with Ubiquiti.
My buddy is now dumping his apple Wifi because he’s tired of degrading performance and frequent restarts.
JUST the QOS feature in the Ubiquiti router is worth the change. Come on Apple how do you not have QOS in an expensive router.
I had a pile of Apple wifi gear that I sold on craigslist. Apple needs to get it’s collective head out of it’s ass. You’re designing sub par hardware and driving customers away. For the first time in my life I’m looking at PC computers (I can’t believe I just said that), but you can’t even compete with laptops and towers of competitors that are half the price, plus I can upgrade them. I don’t want a think laptop and give up the ability to upgrade the memory or have a real graphics card.
Show me a Apple computer that can process 4k iPhone video footage and not spend a week rendering it and I’ll buy it. As longs as you don’t solder all that crap on the boards.