Unify Wifi 7 devices - a pain to install

[Lawrence Ellul]

Unify has been pushing Wifi 7 compatible networking devices over the past weeks and months. I personally believe that they are rushing to market these products at the expense of not ensuring compatibility with other devices they market. So I recently purchased a a unify express (not the wifi 7 version) and 2 in wall APs. These support wifi 7. To be clear the Wifi 7 APs are cheaper than wifi 6 so my trusted supplier/technician advised me about this and had no issue. Having already installed a Unify network I was expecting a very easy installation and deployment of the network.

 

Installation of Unify express went smooth, wifi networks set up easily as expected. However when connecting the Aps these could not be setup. The controller was not seeing the APs. After several resets of both the aps and unify express there was no way I could have the APs set up. 

 

Contacting Unify it turns out that the APs require a version of Unify OS that is not installed on the controller. To add insult to injury there is no planned update available, however there is a trial version of the OS that can be installed. After a coupe of hours the tech managed to flash the controller with the new OS and hey presto the APs could be configured

 

Why is Unify pushing to market these devices if they cannot be installed easily on networks having their own controllers?

 

 

[brwainer]

This is more of a situation where it looks like the UX (not UX7) is being left behind. It hasn’t had an official update to Network 9.x nor UnifiOS 4.1, which everything else has had for months. Any other controller hardware you could have bought would not have had this issue.

[Lawrence Ellul]

Yes and that is very strange. Unify is pushing the UX7, and from what I can see the UX is not being advertised that much. Yes true If i just bought any other controller I wouldn't have had any problems. Even my 3 year old UDM is running Network 9.x. I opted for the UX as I needed something small to hide in a cabinet and the network itself will be very small. 

[Falcon1986]

7 minutes ago, Lawrence Ellul said:

Yes and that is very strange. Unify is pushing the UX7, and from what I can see the UX is not being advertised that much. Yes true If i just bought any other controller I wouldn't have had any problems. Even my 3 year old UDM is running Network 9.x. I opted for the UX as I needed something small to hide in a cabinet and the network itself will be very small. 

Unfortunately, if you haven't been following Ubiquiti products closely, things like this can happen.

 

When I heard about the UX via YouTube reviewers, I thought it was a good idea, but then I started hearing that it wasn't working as intended or giving problems, just like the original UDR. I'm not surprised that these were quickly upgraded with WiFi 7 variants that seem to perform better now (as per reviewers; no personal experience). I suppose Ubiquiti realized the problems as well and decided to discontinue regular software updates, but that has the unfortunate side effect that you initially experienced. Not sure why they still have the UX on their store front; probably need to sell off stock.

 

If I were in your situation, I would return the UX and get a UX7 instead. You'll get better support for the latter in the long term, hopefully.