Ubiquiti Access Points - False Advertising?

[PenguinMaster]

On the Ubiquiti page for the "UniFi 6 Long-Range Access Point", it says "It delivers an aggregate radio rate of up to 3.0 Gbps with 5 GHz". Then if you go into the description of the access point, it says the PoE port is "1 Gbps Ethernet RJ45". How can a 1GbE port support 3 Gig? That makes no sense. If you look at the new Access points from Netgear, you'll see that the PoE port is now 2.5 GbE. That is what I was expecting the Ubiquiti AP's to have too.

[WhitetailAni]

Marketing-speak.

It can probably support 3 Gbps, just the Ethernet controller can't.

[ToboRobot]

8 minutes ago, Chickenfans said:

On the Ubiquiti page for the "UniFi 6 Long-Range Access Point", it says "It delivers an aggregate radio rate of up to 3.0 Gbps with 5 GHz". Then if you go into the description of the access point, it says the PoE port is "1 Gbps Ethernet RJ45". How can a 1GbE port support 3 Gig? That makes no sense. If you look at the new Access points from Netgear, you'll see that the PoE port is now 2.5 GbE. That is what I was expecting the Ubiquiti AP's to have too.

 

[Levent]

Their claim is not wrong. It particularly states that it can do that on 5ghz radio, not on wired.

[porina]

Could be useful if you were to transfer between two wireless devices.

[PenguinMaster]

Wouldn't you think if they put all the effort into making a fast access point they would put in a faster ethernet controller? I love Ubiquiti gear, but it doesn't make sense to buy these because the Netgear access points are the same price with 2.5 GbE as opposed to 1 GbE.

14 minutes ago, ragnarok0273 said:

Marketing-speak.

It can probably support 3 Gbps, just the Ethernet controller can't.

 

10 minutes ago, Levent said:

Their claim is not wrong. It particularly states that it can do that on 5ghz radio, not on wired.

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

6 minutes ago, PenguinMaster said:

Wouldn't you think if they put all the effort into making a fast access point they would put in a faster ethernet controller? I love Ubiquiti gear, but it doesn't make sense to buy these because the Netgear access points are the same price with 2.5 GbE as opposed to 1 GbE.

 

 

well your pretty unlikely to hit more than 1gbe on most wifi uses anyways, and 2.5gbe switches are pretty rare, so its not a huge factor.

 

There just calining the max combined phy rate on 5ghz is 3gbit, and thats true, but your never hitting 3gbit on wifi.

[Falcon1986]

This advertising isn't unique to Ubiquiti. All manufacturers do this in some way to entice the uninformed buyer. However, at least Ubiquiti goes a step further to actually say that it is aggregate speed.

 

That being said, they should probably clarify that speed as being an aggregate between clients on different bands at optimal settings wirelessly connected to that particular AP.

 

An AP will never reach its full speed as per specification in real world application, but it can generally at least reach half of that. I know this is an oversimplification, but 50% of 3000 is better than 50% of 1000.

 

As for the speed of the NIC, I don't think this is the only WiFi 6 AP we're going to see from them. They are competing with other manufacturers with better specifications on paper and WiFi 6E is starting to pop up, so I'd expect there to be multi-gig support for the uplink NIC coming soon.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Its my understanding Ubiquity are bargain budget built, even within the budget end of the business hardware market.  I'm thinking of going to Zyxel for WiFi 6e as I hate the Unifi software and how Ubiquity firmware always seem to be full of bugs at launch.

 

My nanoHD seems to be getting slower and slower with each new firmware update with no indication of it being crosstalk related.

 

I certainly wont be touching anything without a 2.5Gbit port.

[Darren]

On 1/3/2021 at 12:26 PM, Falcon1986 said:

An AP will never reach its full speed as per specification in real world application, but it can generally at least reach half of that. I know this is an oversimplification, but 50% of 3000 is better than 50% of 1000.

 

It's because 3Gbps is total of both TX/RX capability, so 1500Mbps in each direction. They could be helpful and say 3Gbps half-duplex but that wouldn't look nice on marketing material.

[McBUrn]

The key thing to understand here is that not all the traffic between devices go through the router and therefore through the the gig physical link of the AP. Layer 2 frames are going directly from one host to the other. For inter Vlan traffic and without a capable switch the traffic indeed goes back to the rounter.

There is therefore no need to have a match between the max throughput and the wired backhaul speed. Plus most Wifi use is highly tied to internet use where speeds above 1Gig are pretty much non existent anyway ... I mean, who's gonna use Wifi to perform massive file transfers/edits or whaterver instead of using a physical connection.