A few weeks ago @Wirednot lobbed a question to the internet with the familiar #WIFIQ tag:
#WIFIQ 3/27/17 From what you know of or about Ubiquiti, will they ever become a legit contender in Enterprise WLAN? Pros/Cons? @ubnt— Lee Badman (@wirednot) March 27, 2017
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It started off a pretty good conversation, that ended up with me receiving a box of gear from Ubiquiti to see what my impressions of their full suite of products would be.
Challenge accepted @UBNT_Brandon @ubnt #iwanttobelieve #steppinguptotheplate pic.twitter.com/ZCRdIVPMa1— Wireless Nerd (@Wirelessnerd) April 12, 2017
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js I’m looking forward to getting this going so that I can get a great feeling of what the products can do, how they can do it, and when properly installed, what the benefit to the customer can be.
When Properly Installed…
So the @UBNT twitter account retweeted the above tweet and my timeline blew up. The 80k users following it started throwing hearts at my tweet, which is always fun. I jumped on the UBNT timeline to see what else they had retweeted lately and I about shit myself.
Spotted some @ubnt access points at dinner! pic.twitter.com/GhK7AUN5vN— Jeff Wilcox (@jeffwilcox) April 3, 2017
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El cliente tenía 300Mbps de @movistar_es y los quería disfrutar en las tres plantas de su casa…lo hicimos realidad… #UniFi #AC de @ubnt pic.twitter.com/tPCQNyHB5V— WiFi Solutions (@WiFiSolutionsES) April 9, 2017
After seeing those tweets, I couldn’t scroll any longer and I had to fire up Blogger to post this…
In case you don’t understand the rage here:
Example 1: WHY WOULD YOU LAY AN AP ON A METAL COUNTER WITH AN ALUMINUM WALL BEHIND IT?
Example 2: WHY WOULD YOU PLACE AN OMNIDIRECTIONAL ANTENNA IN A CORNER?? MULTIPLE TIMES???
If you don’t know anything about wireless, think about this:
It’s like a light bulb. If you’re trying to get light to everyone in the room, where would you mount the light? IN THE CORNER OF COURSE.
Here’s My Problem With Ubiquiti
Whether or not the radios work, the software works, or they are capable products, they incidentally made everyone think that they could handle wireless installations. Honestly, Ubiquiti didn’t even do this on purpose. Their low-cost in the market destroyed the barrier of entry for everyone, and the flood gates were opened. Suddenly everyone thinks they know “how to Wi-Fi”. The only problem is THEY DON’T. This gives wireless professionals a pretty bad name.
When you’re trying to use the Wi-Fi in the restaurant where the AP is mounted in THE CORNER and it doesn’t work, you blame the W-Fi. You don’t blame the AP vendor or the person who put it IN the corner, you blame the Wi-Fi!!
Now, when you have to sell wireless access to a business owner, what do they naturally say “yeah, Wi-Fi sucks”. Thanks to the corner guy, that business owner is now jaded. It’s an uphill battle because some knucklehead thought they’d make a dime by installing Wi-Fi.
Help Make the LightBulbs Go Off, Please.
Now multiply that times Ubiquiti’s market share in the industry.
And when the @UBNT twitter handle tweets that garbage out to 80K followers, everyone thinks it’s OK to do that! C’mon now. With great products come great responsibility.
My advice, hey @UBNT, please encourage people to learn about wireless before they continue to do ridiculous stuff like this.
At the very least, throw a graphic in your actually really, really, awesome packaging, that explains that Wi-Fi is like a light bulb: if you want good coverage, mount it it where you would a lightbulb trying to serve the room.
KTHX. Rant over.
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