Ubiquiti UniFi 6 Pro Acces Point Wifi 6 AP 5.3Gbps 300+ clients (U6-PRO), dual band

Product Information

For my next test, I tested from 3 different places in my house. I wanted to show the impact of distance from your AP on a typical 20 MHz 2.4 GHz or 80 MHz 5 GHz channel. The above tests were very close range, and were meant to show an absolute best-case scenario. These distance tests are more realistic, and the 15 feet + 1 wall results are more likely what you will see in typical use. Now how reliable that Wi-Fi is across the whole home and whether there are dead spots is another matter altogether. If your home is large or spread across multiple floors, a single Wi-Fi router is just not going to cut it. But your ISP-provided router comes with just 1 Wi-Fi radio. The U6 Lite has a 1.3 Gbps aggregate throughput, the U6 LR has 3.0 Gbps, the U6 Pro and U6 Mesh both have 5.3 Gbps. P 8 = Use 8 parallel streams. Without parallel streams, the default TCP window and buffer size of iPerf doesn’t always saturate a fast wireless channel. To maintain consistency I ran all my tests with the default window and buffer sizes, with 8 parallel streams. While the likes of TP-Link, Google and Netgear have decent mesh Wi-Fi offerings these days, UniFi WAPs are at a whole different level when used as a part of a UniFi OS/console managed home network. And that’s exactly what we have in the VueVille DIY Smart Home network.

The U6 Mesh can be placed on a table, wall-mounted or ceiling-mounted, but the others are designed to be wall or ceiling mounted only. You can of course place the others on a table but coverage may suffer.There is a bump in the antenna gain of 0.5dBi for the 5GHz, while the transmit power is 22dBm as opposed to the 26dBm of the U6-LR, the platform is also different but is that enough to make a noticeable difference between the two models? There should be a difference, but I am not sure it’s going to be that steep, hence the small difference in terms of cost between the two models. The U6-Mesh takes the FlexHD’s enclosure and stuffs Wi-Fi 6 radios in it. It's a AX5400 Qualcomm-based AP like the U6-Pro. The U6-Mesh runs hot, but it also performs very well. It is IPX5 certified, meaning it can be used indoors or out, and mounted in the same way the FlexHD can be. In any case, on the bottom of the Ubiquiti U6-Pro, there is a dedicated area carved into the plastic where you can find the Reset button and a single Gigabit Ethernet port which supports PoE (802.3af). Left: Ubiquiti UAP-AC-PRO. Right: Ubiquiti U6-Pro. The U6 Lite and U6 Mesh have comparable 2.4 GHz performance at various distances, but at 5 GHz the U6 Mesh is faster. One UniFied Network: Option to create one large wireless network across multiple APs that lets users seamlessly roam.

The speed remains fairly consistent up until the 45 feet spot (-77dB), where the throughput goes down to 162Mbps up and 33.6Mbps downstream. Going farther to 70 feet disconnected the client device once again, so the problem is that the Ubiquiti U6-Pro just doesn’t reach that far, while most other WiFi 6 APs do. Was that done as to not overlap the potential audience for the U6-LR? Probably. Next, I detached the metallic part of the case, leaving the antenna assembly still connected to the PCB. Flipping it upside down allowed me to identify the dual-core 1GHz Qualcomm IPQ5018, there are 4GB of flash NAND memory from Mouser Electronics (THGBMNG5D1LBAIL VD6963 2147KAE) and 8MB flash memory from MXIC (25U6432F). Ubiquiti U6-Pro Teardown. The U6-Lite has an older 2.4 GHz radio, meaning it doesn’t deliver the benefits of Wi-Fi 6 for 2.4 GHz clients. The U6-Lite is an AX1500 class AP, with an 802.11n-era 2.4 GHz radio and a 5 GHz radio that tops out at 80 MHz channel width. The U6-Lite doesn’t support 160 MHz channels, unlike the U6-LR, Pro, and Mesh. They can all operate in DFS channels in the US, though. The U6 Mesh has a horizontal antenna pattern to maximise coverage on the same level/floor, the others have a forward beam-pattern that is better suited to ceiling-mounting. I understand the push towards using PoE more since it’s so convenient, but I would have still wanted the option to power up the access point via a power cable. I have mentioned before that the Ubiquiti U6-Pro was built to withstand outdoor conditions and the device is indeed IP54-rated which I suppose could ensure that it withstands some degree of abuse from the elements. But I would still be careful to not put it completely in the open. Make sure that there is some sort of roof above it, otherwise it’s not going to last that long. Internal Hardware (Ubiquiti U6-Pro Teardown)

In reality, a single U6-LR or U6-Pro can cover my entire house, at least with a usable 2.4 GHz signal. So why is my current network a UDM, U6-Pro, U6-Enterprise, and an AC-Mesh? For one, I'm a nerd and I like over-engineering things. I don’t need four access points to cover my house and yard, but by using more radios at lower power, I’m optimizing for maximum performance in every corner. The UniFi brand is the one that interests enthusiasts like me. It is considered a prosumer product line in that it supports features that are found more commonly at the enterprise-level but at a more affordable price. As the name implies, the U6-LR offers more range than the U6-Lite. The U6-LR has twice the spatial streams (2x2:2 vs. 4x4:4) in both bands, resulting in better beamforming and higher potential throughput. It is physically much larger, the same size as the AC-HD. The U6-LR is a step up in nearly every way, but it still has an older 802.11n-era 2.4 GHz radio and MediaTek chipset like the U6-Lite. With every foot of free space and every obstruction, a Wi-Fi signal attenuates and gets weaker. 5 GHz signals attenuate faster, and provide around half the range of 2.4 GHz. When deciding on how many access points you need, a good general rule is don’t expect 5 GHz coverage to extend further than 2 walls or 30 feet away. Some APs like the U6-LR extend this circle out a bit, but with the others APs, roaming to 2.4 GHz or getting low SNR 5 GHz performance is possible at the far edges. The Ubiquiti UniFi Prooffers simultaneous dual-band operation with 2x2 and 3x3 MIMO technology. It has a range of up to 400 ft and 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports.The UAP Prois faster than the standard UAP model, offering speeds of up to 300 Mbps in the 5 GHz radio band and up to 450 Mbps in the 2.4 GHz radio band.

I don’t recommend using 40 MHz channels in the 2.4 GHz band, due to them overlapping with over 80% of the already-crowded spectrum. There’s only one non-overlapping 40 MHz channel in North America, and the rest of the world only has two. Like 160 MHz channels in 5 GHz, there is not enough available frequency for them to be reliably used in most situations. Wider channels also impose a noise penalty, and are generally worse at range than narrower channels. Not bound by a contract, you can choose to migrate your devices from our cloud controller at any time. When everything is working properly, then the LED will be solid blue and, before it’s adopted to the UniFi controller, it will be solid white. What’s very problematic is that Ubiquiti has advertised that the users would be able to set the color that they wanted (RGB), but they have removed that feature. I have no idea why because as I said, the single LED pales in comparison to the traditional array of LEDs anyway. Why not have some fun? R = This is downlink test, where the server is sending data to the wireless client. Without this flag, the client will send data to the server.Mesh networking simply means that the Wireless Access Points (WAP) can talk to each other instead of a central base station. This allows you to extend your Wi-Fi range considerably because each WAP can simply connect to the nearest WAP. This is called wireless up-link and is the term that UniFi also uses. So mesh networking does not make your Wi-FI faster, it is just a different way of connecting wireless access points together. Does the UniFi-6 support Mesh?