Does Ubiquiti have lots of quality control issues

[zaphod]

There is a rant here (from the Missing Remote website): https://www.missingremote.com/blog/2021/10/ubiquiti-has-massive-quality-problem

Do others have issues?  I have only had one failure in about 8 products and that was my fault as I let a product get full of water. 

[chopedogg88]

I have had several unifi switches fail, as well as a few USG routers. 

[ejn1]

I had 2 ports go out on one switch after 5 years….   Camera that are outdoors and running 24/7 can sometime have the IR filter freeze after 3-4 years….  That’s about it for me.   No critical networking router or switch has failed on me yet other the the couple of ports mentioned above.

[Amr]

I had one UAP access point died on me after 3 yrs, I trashed it obviously as nothing make it work again

[Jack_Ckun]

I had the poe on 2 switches die.

[Andrew luecke]

It varies.. They have had buggy hardware before (which was recalled), but so does everyone.

The biggest risk with ubiquiti is firmware. They often release products with unfinished firmware, and sometimes, their quality of software dips (like when they released firmware that fried the UAP-Pro radios). Or the UAP-SHD which is advertised as WIPS, but doesn't actually seem to be.. 

My biggest concern at the moment is that, once again, they are diversifying their product range too much and focusing less on networking, and working on things like access control. They don't even have proper Dual WAN yet on their gateways when I tried last year (which is weird for a networking company).

They also could be doing things like create a public API so we can integrate safely (I started writing a Unifi driver last year actually, but I'm hesitant about finishing it personally, because the API could change between releases)

Good products. They have their own risks, but I wouldn't say failing hardware however is one of them personally..  

 

In my previous job, we sold heaps of it, and the majority of issues was user error (like plugging a network cable into the console port of switches), or firmware. We didn't have to do many returns 

 

[tmj4]

I've had only 1 switch die, but it was a known issue on a the older 16-port PoE switch from about 5 years ago due to the very off-the-shelf power supply being of poor quality. I believe Cisco and others had issues with this same PS as well. I ended up finding a replacement PS and once swapping it in, the switch has worked great for about 3 years now. It's mostly always firmware you need to be cautious of Never had an issue w/any of my other gear. 

If your curious, "my other gear" (if that helps w/reliability or dependability):

UDM-Pro
USW-Aggregation
USW-Flex-Mini x3
USW-Flex x3
USW-Pro-24-PoE
US-8 x2
US-24-G1
US-16-150W
UAP-AC-Pro
UAP-AC-IW x3
UAP-AC-M-Pro
UAP-AC-M
---------------
G3 Flex
G4 Dome x2
G4 Pro x2

[ejn1]

4 hours ago, Andrew luecke said:

They don't even have proper Dual WAN yet on their gateways when I tried last year (which is weird for a networking company).

 

I have had dual WAN with failover on the last 2 generations of Unifi routers...   Thats what most folks on this forum would use for dual WAN, either failover or load balancing which it does either.

[Andrew luecke]

28 minutes ago, ejn1 said:

I have had dual WAN with failover on the last 2 generations of Unifi routers...   Thats what most folks on this forum would use for dual WAN, either failover or load balancing which it does either.

Unless things have changed though, failover couldn't prioritise a specific connection to failback to, and there was no proper policy based WAN routing which is available on other enterprise routers (but, they had seemingly plenty of time to continuously redesign the GUI). 

That being said, CloudKey V1 was a product that should have been recalled (that I forgot about), and the USG was released prematurely too. The UAP-ACv1 was also a rush job.  

I haven't been an installer for the past year though (so things may have improved). One would argue though that the priority for a network company should be to release Wifi6 AP's as a priority, instead of access control

Things have gotten better, and the current hardware is good.. But their prioritises are a bit weird at times

 

 

[ejn1]

3 minutes ago, Andrew luecke said:

Unless things have changed though, failover couldn't prioritise a specific connection to failback to, and there was no proper policy based WAN routing which is available on other enterprise routers (but, they had seemingly plenty of time to continuously redesign the GUI). 

That being said, CloudKey V1 was a product that should have been recalled (that I forgot about), and the USG was released prematurely too. The UAP-ACv1 was also a rush job.  

I haven't been an installer for the past year though (so things may have improved). One would argue though that the priority for a network company should be to release Wifi6 AP's as a priority, instead of access control

Things have gotten better, and the current hardware is good.. But their prioritises are a bit weird at times

 

 

It had a few quirks several years ago (I attributed to my ATT Gateway router which even in IP pass through was still returning a ping back to the Unifi thus not triggering failover) but seems to work flawless now between WAN1 and WAN2 (Failover) with a UDM-Pro.

[Andrew luecke]

Not to stretch the topic, I have a UDM at home only, but have they fixed policy based routing of WAN?  

[ejn1]

18 minutes ago, Andrew luecke said:

Not to stretch the topic, I have a UDM at home only, but have they fixed policy based routing of WAN?  

Sorry,  haven't checked this aspect but maybe others have...

[Cyknight]

Every USG router we've put in failed (which wasn't many, as they failed quick), also several switches - mainly PoE, one or two regular. Stopped those pretty quick too. All this was within an 18 month trial period to see how they held up.

Only a few APs have failed, though again, we don't commonly sell them.

 

Overall their failure rate for us has been only beat by Atlona as an overall brand (binary 300 takes the prize home as a specific model).

[Andrew luecke]

Just now, Cyknight said:

Every USG router we've put in failed (which wasn't many, as they failed quick), also several switches - mainly PoE, one or two regular. Stopped those pretty quick too. All this was within an 18 month trial period to see how they held up.

Only a few APs have failed, though again, we don't commonly sell them.

 

Overall their failure rate for us has been only beat by Atlona as an overall brand (binary 300 takes the prize home as a specific model).

Here in Australia at least, the USG's shipped with crappy 1A 12V power supplies. It may be similar to US, but after swapping them with bigger ones, they were solid. The original firmware on them was horrible though. 

The EdgeRouter Lite 3's though was another product (few years ago) with bad hardware.. The USB memory on them failed quickly

[BXTR]

In past 4 years 

1 usg power supply

1 48 port 500 watt poe switch

1 in wall wifi antenna

1 LocoM2

I’d say that’s pretty good out of roughly 100k worth of Ubiquiti

I might question higher failure rates being due to power quality ie: no ups being used

[Cyknight]

11 minutes ago, BXTR said:

I might question higher failure rates being due to power quality ie: no ups being used

You might, but you'd be utterly wrong.

[Cyknight]

23 minutes ago, Andrew luecke said:

the USG's shipped with crappy 1A 12V power supplies.

Yes, I wasn't claiming they failed as in got ripped out, but it's still a failure rate - just like so many HC200's external power supplies have failed, or for that matter early 2G JAP powersupplies. Indeed it's the same for Atlona - some of their 'failures' have been 'just' power supplies too. Even if the manufacturer covers the repairs, whatever form they take, it's still a a failure rate. Not a hard or expensive fix material wise in this case, but it always costs SOMEONE money (in the form of time) - and it won't be the client on my account, and it's (almost) never the manufacturer.

Understand this isn't an outright attack on them, they're obviously an economical choice for OK specs overall and there's nothing wrong with that - it's just not something I'd be willing to support and stand behind as a product I supply. We supply it, we cover it (within a reasonable time frame of course).

 

 

[zaphod]

And to be fair, C4 have had QC issues as well. Things that come immediately to mind are HC-300 power supplies, SR-260 screens and the Amp108 to name three where I have direct experience as an end user. 

[BXTR]

21 hours ago, Cyknight said:

You might, but you'd be utterly wrong.

I would’ve accepted “wrong” but an “utterly wrong”?… man, them’s fightin’ words lol

For the record, most times we do a takeover that has suffered from excessive failures or crappy system stability it’s due to the lack of a UPS

 

[Cyknight]

17 hours ago, BXTR said:

I would’ve accepted “wrong” but an “utterly wrong”?… man, them’s fightin’ words lol

For the record, most times we do a takeover that has suffered from excessive failures or crappy system stability it’s due to the lack of a UPS

 

As you're replying to my post there, yes you are utterly wrong if you're thinking there's no UPS in the installs I was talking about

In general terms, that may be a different matter.

[BXTR]

9 hours ago, Cyknight said:

As you're replying to my post there, yes you are utterly wrong if you're thinking there's no UPS in the installs I was talking about

In general terms, that may be a different matter.

You must be a blast at parties 

[Cyknight]

4 hours ago, BXTR said:

You must be a blast at parties 

I'm sure I'm up there with yourself.