Hands-on: Ubiquiti’s Amplifi covers the whole house in a Wi-Fi mesh

Back in May, networking OEM Ubiquiti announced its new Ubiquiti Labs division and that division’s first product: a home mesh Wi-Fi system called Amplifi. With Amplifi, Ubiquiti intends to stretch its reach out of SMB/enterprise "lite" networking and into home territory—and not just the homes of crazies like me, either. Amplifi is targeted at the plug-and-play crowd for whom a single, central Wi-Fi base station doesn’t quite cut the mustard. It’s a market squarely occupied by Eero, Luma, and a few other players—home mesh Wi-Fi, where you throw down a few devices and every nook and cranny of your home gets solid coverage (in theory, at least).

Ubiquiti sent Ars a preproduction Amplifi unit last week, and I’ve spent the weekend getting some initial impressions. This isn’t going to be an exhaustive review, since I’ve only had a few days with the system, but my impressions so far are generally positive.

The quick takeaway

The Amplifi system isn't something I’d buy for myself, but it is something I’d happily buy for my parents, who have a large home thanks to Houston’s absurdly cheap housing market and struggle to get solid Wi-Fi coverage throughout. Amplifi doesn’t support several features that I depend on (especially WPA2 Enterprise for 802.1X), but setup is painless, reasonably quick, and the handoff between the various mesh components works seamlessly. It's also a competent router with an actual firewall (the device runs BusyBox and uses iptables under the hood). And, if you already have a router you're happy with, it can function as a pure Wi-Fi access point and mesh network.

Power users might be turned off by the fact that the Web interface is very basic and almost all management needs to be done via an iOS or Android app; on the other hand, the Amplifi kit supports ssh access out of the box (via LAN or WLAN, not the WAN side) and if you prefer to sysadmin from the command line, it looks like there’s some stuff for you to play with there without having to use the app. The one big frustration I had was not being able to turn off DHCP with the device in router mode, which meant I had to disable my own off-box DHCP server to avoid DHCP conflicts while tinkering. However, this isn’t going to be a problem for the vast majority of users, so it’s hard to count it as a real downside.

Amplifi systems go on sale today in North America (international availability is still to come). With three models and a price range from $199 to $349, the Amplifi gear is priced aggressively against Eero ($499 for a three-device starter pack) and others (Apple, for example, charges $199 for an Airport Extreme and then $99 per Airport Express for mesh-like extension). The main draws for buying the more expensive Amplifi models are range and speed; if you’re doing a ton of streaming to lots of devices (like if you’ve got a family of a half-dozen Netflix watchers) the lack of 802.11ac on the mesh points for the Standard and LR might be enough to push you up the stack. However, the $199 Standard feels like a solid value proposition for most folks.

The details: unboxing and setup

Ubiquiti sent us the top-end unit, the Amplifi HD, with its 802.11ac mesh points and extra radios. The kit arrived in a smart-looking black box with "Ubiquiti Labs" branding on it, and the packaging felt professional and distinctly Apple-like, with each system component encased in clear peel-off plastic.

Inside the box was the base station, the two mesh points, an AC adapter with a Micro-USB plug, a 1.5-meter Cat5 Ethernet patch cable, and a small instruction booklet. Setup involved downloading the Amplifi app (I tested with iOS because that’s the phone I had at hand, but there is an Android app as well), applying power to the base station and plugging it into my cable modem, and then walking through the app's guided steps.

You can plug the base station into your LAN switch instead of setting it up as a router; in that case, it will grab a DHCP address, and you can do some basic configuration tasks on it with a Web browser. However, the Web interface is currently limited to basic setup only—anything past that requires the app. As a third option, you can also use your phone to join a temporary setup network created by the base station to get things operational.

I did the setup the recommended way, via the app, creating a new SSID for my new wireless network. I also ran into a minor snag, but as with most of my issues, it’s not a snag a lot of other folks are going to care about. I have a business-class Internet connection with a static IP address, and the Amplifi’s automated Internet setup failed because it couldn’t grab a DHCP address from my ISP. Fortunately, this was quickly fixed by a trip into the app’s settings, where I was able to specify the correct static IP address and gateway information.

Once the base station was online, it made a little series of happy beeps to let me know it was connected to the Internet. The next and final thing on the setup task list was to plug in the mesh points, which I did at opposite corners of the house. They blinked for a bit, and within about two minutes they’d attached themselves to the base station and were part of the mesh network, sharing the same SSID and broadcasting it throughout the house (and out into the back yard and a ways into the street, too). It was pretty easy, and other than the static IP address hiccup there simply wasn't much to it.