Amplifi HE or AP mesh units

T

tangoseal

[H]F Junkie
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Dec 18, 2010
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Hello

I have a Cisco 1921 fully equipped been using it for 5 years. Ex Cisco guy lol

I have a 3k sqft house. 1 single AP AC LR covering all of it. Sure I can walk 200 foot to.my mail box and get Pandora on my phone an acre away but the the bandwidth is awful unless I'm in the room with the AP.

Anyways was considering the Amplifi HD, but I require VPN passthrough. Do these allow? Can the router part be set to access port or is it a permanently dedicated router?

On to the Mesh APs... these are dedicated 2 antenna indoor outdoor APs and mesh each other.

Do they require a ubiquiti router to function? Can I Include my aplr in with the Mesh points?

The mesh points are way less. I can buy 4 for the price of amplifi HD.

Or would the HD be better?

Speed wise?

Thoughts preferably from people that have used one or both. Thanks.
 
tangoseal -

This is an awesome post, and thanks for the details and sharing the Amplifi HD system. I had not seen it before or read any discussions about it.

Don't take this as condescending, but have you read through the user guide? It seems to contain a lot of information, but when I skimmed through on a single pass, I didn't see much configuration information as using the Amplifi HD router as a switch/AP only.

https://amplifi.com/docs/AmpliFi_UG.pdf

It might be worth reading through if you haven't yet.
 
tangoseal, you may as well just get a few more of the APs and mesh them... you could handle the configuration of that...

amplifi is a dumbed down consumer-ized version...

best to have a wire run to each AP though...

all they're really doing is throwing more radios in these devices and dedicating some of them for the backhaul network and taking care of all of the configuration for you...
 
Yeah that is what I was thinking. I'm just so over running cat5 everywhere in my log cabin house. But if I must I will.

So last night I found out that the Amplifi can be set to bridge mode making the whole mesh one big AP with no router function. Took a lot of deep digging on Ubiquiti site which is highly unprofessional if you ask me that they just didn't publish it in main docs.

I like the AP AC LR its quiet, cool to the touch, performs fast on 5ghz if you 10 foot away or less sigh... The 2.4ghz really travels far like 2 acres away on my property. But the speed drops drastically through walls. My house is made of all solid wood and that is a big Rf sponge at these UHF frequencies.

I will look deeper into the possibility of running 2 more dedicated APs with a cable and juat set 1 ssid and forget about it. Let the devices sort of roam through it all. Just no way to hide cabling easy in my home hence my initial interest in running a mesh (fancy marketing jargon for roamable wifi lan).
 
Well I did some throughput testing and my Cisco 1921 is PEGGED at 120mbit/s through comcast. I have a 150 and direct connected to the modem I am pulling 180mpbs so I ordered the amplifi HD system since it has a much faster router. I no longer need enterprise stuff anymore. I am good with something that is easy to setup and just works. Evne though I will still use my Cisco for something or another I am sure. It is fully equipped and licensed. Shame to let it go but I am losing 50 mbps extra by using it. And it certainly wouldn't keep up with Docsis 3.1 speeds once they drop in the area.
 
Returning AmpHD and I just ordered 2 ap mesh non pros. I dont need the extra expense of pros for home.

I'm gonna mount a mesh inside house and use my APACLR as the uplink (root). The other mesh is going outside but I'm gonna use it in point to point since I can run a direct Ethernet from switch around side of my house. It's rain proof so I got it for that reason. I probably won't mesh the outside. But I will mesh the inside. That way I have my USG as the firewall and ill use my Cisco 4948 switch as the backbone of it all. Until I get a Unifi switch if I ever want too. I don't see the need right esp. With all the switches I already own.
 
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