Thought I would share my home networking adventure. I have been a ubiquiti fanboy since the Edgerouter days. I’ve had most all of their shiny equipment and even had stable networks now and then. I have also been through most all of Ubiquiti’s less-than-stellar firmware releases. For some reason, even though my UniFi network has always been so so, I stuck with it. I even upgraded as far as the cloud gateway fiber and U6-Enterprise APs. I got around the years of missing local DNS entries by running my own servers. I told myself it was ok that logging was non existent because “it was just my home lab”. I had intermittent streaming issues to my AppleTV, and my HomePods were never happy for more than a few weeks at a time. …. Getting the idea?
Things have changed. My family and I moved a year ago and I work from home full time now. I am a network engineer for a university and spend all day online on VPN connections and teams calls. My home network has to be rock solid. I did not put my UniFi gear back in…but what to use?
Someone told me about Alta labs and I thought I would give them a try. Initially I was impressed. The cloud controller is very fast and the development seemed really fast. WiFi is very stable and fast and performs well in my very dense environment. The engineers are eager to talk with you and are available on chat and over the phone. However, the router offering barely passes as a router right now, and the heavy push to cloud only is not sitting well with me. You can’t back up your “site”, and if there is no internet, you cannot make any config changes. I decided I want a network stack that is fully locally managed.
Long story short, I moved to a full Grandstream stack. I am very impressed. At the moment I am on a GCC6010, GWN7813P, GWN7801P, and a GWN7664 AP. I have two GWN7672 APs on order. Configuration wise I have everything the same as my UniFi setup was. MGT VLAN, Main VLAN, Work VLAN, IoT VLAN. This setup is the most stable I have ever had. I have not had to reconnect my work VPN since swapping. Teams calls and smooth and clear. VOIP calls are clear and crisp. Our AppleTV and HomePods are smooth and quick to stream to. Best of all, it is all locally managed. I can make changes any time I want, and my Cisco iOS knowledge even helps if I want to really geek out and use CLI on the switches.
I am very impressed with the huge breadth of security features on the GCC firewalls. I’m using geo-ip blocking and app filtering. The first year of advanced firewall is free!! after that it’s only $79 a year. Crazy value for money. Very happy with my switch.
For context I have a gigabit symmetrical fiber connection and my 6010 has no problems with it.
My father in law has a florist shop and coffee shop where a good amount of people sit all day and have coffee and enjoy the guest wifi. I started with all unifi there and he would call me a couple times every week saying people could not access the guest wifi. I would mess with power levels of the ap’s albeit they weren’t the best ones (AC Lite’s) and the users would be able to get on. I finally got tired of it and ripped everything out and put all new Grandstream equipment in and paid for it all myself. This equipment has been in for close to 2 years now and he has only called me about a user once! I only have issues with a 3rd building he bought next door that has power issues and the Engenius PtP will need to be rebooted after they have a power blip. He is buying a small UPS to put in and hopefully that will solve the issues there. His Internet is TMobile 5g and everything including his Grandstream PBX has been working perfectly.
I started to move away from Ubiquiti when Grandstream started doing Wifi APs. Now I almost got my home lab with everything GS and my office is fully GS. I switched out my gwn7003 at the office last week for the gcc6011, such a great router for the money, and yeah the advanced firewall price is not bad at all. I really like the botnet blocking and Geo-IP filtering.
And so far, all my client locations that use GS equipment, I really have no issues!
You all know that since beginning my social media presence, it was Ubiquiti all the way around. James and I have been working on Grandstream PBX appliances for years – then Grandstream sent me a couple of APs. The roaming was spot on the QoS that automatically prioritizes voice just works with no tweaking as long as your APs are configured appropriately. We use Grandstream as our first choice when people want voice of WiFi – and if they don’t go down that road we make them sign off that we are not responsible for it working correctly. We’ve used many vendors and with Grandstream being a voice first company – they get it and it shows. All vendors have their firmware hiccups but you can tell Grandstream listens to customers. We install and support both – but with the looming cyber insurance tidal wave inching closer we have been turning to the GCC series as part of the security jaw breaker to get ahead of what is being required and will be required in the near future. The GCC6010 can be had for $149 USD + shipping and as stated above you get the first year of security updates at no charge. The second year is only $79 and to make things better it doesn’t matter which GCC device you have (the 6010 series or the new 6020 beasts) the yearly updates are the same cost. You won’t find that with many vendors – and the lowest cost GCC and the highest cost GCC have all the same next gen firewall options available.
We find the niche we work in (GS, UI, SYNO, etc.) to be a dual edge sword. The gear is inexpensive enough that anyone can buy it but sometimes getting over the hill on the exact configuration you need can be a challenge – and that’s when the name calling and finger pointing starts.
Sure – we could sell Cisco and Juniper (we support and configure both with my background) but you’ll have the same issue with a much steeper learning curve. I’m knee deep in a Juniper SRX deployment for a customer right now because that appliance will do things (IPSec tunnel natting all subnets to the WAN IP) that other vendors won’t do or can’t do easily.
It comes down to choosing the right tool for the job. Early in my career in the 90’s they used to say “No one ever got fired for using Cisco” – the paradigm has shifted and Cisco is no longer a one stop shop – and it shouldn’t be.
These comments are quite timely and reassuring. I am inundated with U army videos and posts that I was doubting my decision to go with GS! I just had a conversation with someone else moving away from U brand to GS for better reliability/value. I know GS isn’t perfect, but I am not an edge user and will be happy with equipment that works reliably.
I did a comparison a few months ago and was surprised that TP Link was not significantly cheaper than Unifi, but GS was the most competitive. I have since eliminated TP Link and now between GS and U for router, 24 port POE switch and 3 APs GS is over $500 less and I think I would be short a 10Gb port with U.
At this point it isn’t viable to replace the recently deployed Omada network but in the future it does seem a very viable option. I don’t do installs or anything, just manage a couple of networks. But I’m definitely going to keep GS in mind going forward.