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Ubiquity UAP-Outdoor+ Review

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Recently for a motel client I rolled out 12 of these little babies. The UAP-Outdoor+ is a compact, apparently weather resistant access point. The website details are here: https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap-outdoor/

I chose these for a number of factors:

  • they are designed for the outdoors
  • 183M range (apparently)
  • 300Mbps speeds
  • 802.11b/g/n with plenty of bandwidth and a wide frequency band
  • price point was pretty good (compared to other products)
While not strictly producing a meshed network, the UAP-Outdoor+'s have a zero config handoff, so end users won't know as they move around through network range. 

Configuration of the access points was really quite easy - Ubiquity has a great bit of software called UniFi v4.7.6 Controller for Windows. Installing this on my laptop, and connecting it to the same network as the first access point got things up and running really fast. UniFi Controller allows you to configure SSID's, guest network information and everything else about the access points. Love it! Great bit of kit and it made the work of configuring all 12 access points very quick. Ongoing management is excellent too - it shows you information about the clients connected, the data they're using, the most heavily used access points - all sorts of stuff. It also allows you to play with the network topology. In this particular instance, three of the access points are not cabled in - they are "uplinked" via other WAPs. As testing went on, it appeared that my original plan to link certain APs together wasn't as good as the actual data suggested. So I modified it and moved the wirelessly linked access points to other master WAPs. Really excellent and I was very pleased with the rollout. All in all, the budgeted hours for the install were far over the actual hours - always good for the customer and the bottom line.

The range exceeded our expectations significantly and allowed us to push the coverage out to other parts of the property that were designated for a later stage. Needless to say, people were quite happy about the whole thing :-)

I look forward to using the Ubiquity gear again in the future. As for now, I can happily recommend the UAP-Outdoor+ access points!
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