Now that we have used it for couple of weeks (Unifi U6 Mesh + Unifi Express + Unifi Flex Mini switch), in one sentence our experience can be summarized as: ‘Do not buy Unifi for mesh networking’.
What is wrong with it? Backhaul, or lack of it
To elaborate on it, it seems that none of their access points have dedicated backhaul radios, and that means that you are dealing with same congested 5GHz radio band being used both by the client to AP, as well as AP to AP traffic.
In Unifi reddit threads, the common theme is ‘if you do not have them hardwired, you are doing it wrong’, and while on principle I agree with it, setting up proper ethernet cabling afterwards to a house is quite expensive endeavour (unless you’re willing to do surface runs), and Ubiquiti does advertise the ‘mesh’ capability on their web site. I also have used powerline ethernet in the past and that is another can of worms I am not willing to reopen.
To add insult to injury, while I do not have Orbis antenna gain figures, it seems that the previous Orbi APs had better connectivity through obstacles (Orbi also uses 5GHz band for backhaul).
In the end I configured some devices with strong antennas to connect only to one 5GHz AP (the one that is connected to my wired infrastructure), and the rest have substantially worse performance than before Unifi migration if they happen not to be connected to that AP.
Software leaves bit to be desired too
The Unifi Express as a piece of kit is basically laughably underpowered (2x2 radio, slow CPU, little memory), and apparently at least the initial 4-series software (4.0.4) is quite buggy; it is crashing multiple times per day now, but in AP mode, it recovers relatively rapidly and there is no substantial downtime for me.
Some of the time it seems that it shows up as lack of availability of tapo2 - possibly due to worse location of the device than I had with the Orbi (I had to place it closer to the other AP to make mesh connection be reliable, and due to that some of the devices in the home have relatively shoddy network connectivity):
It seems it has crashed 57 times during the last week:
It seems Ubiquiti retracted the software version at some point, and after that, every night the device tried to automatically ‘upgrade’ to some 3.x version, failed, and repeated it again the next night. The funny part is the download is ~1GB, and it seemingly retried it more than once, leading to substantial downtime until I disabled it.
Supposedly this is going to get better; we shall see.
It is not all bad, but..
Visibility of the devices’ internals, wireless network and clients in general (as noted in the previous blog post) is quite good, and the devices look pretty enough. I do not think that is enough for me, though, and I will probably just switch back to the Orbis soon. While they are black boxes, they are black boxes that (seemingly) work better for me.