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[LUG] unifi and soho wifi controllers

 

So I'm finally doing some serious home network upgrading but it's been a 
three or four years since I did any serious wifi stuff and that was 
mostly enterprise level: Cisco and rackmount AP controllers, MPLS, 
site-wide installs, meshed controllers mounted outside on masts, that 
kind of thing. Overkill for a normal sized property even by my standards 
so I've been brushing up on all the new (well to me at least) shiny SOHO 
stuff like Ubiqiti and Microtik.

Anyone got any recent experience, particularly Ubiqiti? I'm most 
interested in the controller/management setups as they seem to have 
rocketed forward in sophistication compared to the horrid stuff I was 
using which mostly involved serial cables or if I was really lucky, a 
flaky http interface.

By contrast the Ubiqiti Unifi ecosystem looks amazing - slick management 
interfaces with monitoring and configurations options that actually 
work! Predictably it's the cloud stuff I'm wary of even though I can 
understand why a cloud-based SDN controller could be a really nice thing 
for many people who are less control-freaky. Remote access just for a 
start, single sign on, apps on your phone, checking home automation and 
CCTV stuff etc all sound lovely to be fair and I would actually like all 
of those things... but under my terms. All the other infrastructure is 
already in place anyway - router, firewall, VPN, VLANs and so on so I 
don't need the new gear to do any of that (although I am actually open 
to upgrading pretty much everything whilst I'm at it and I definitely 
need a new core switch).

What I'm trying to ask I think is how well does this fancy new SOHO wifi 
gear drop in to an existing highly organized network? Does the 
standalone SDN controller have all the features that the "cloud key" 
hardware controller, a rackmount controller or the remote cloud 
controller have? Ideally I want to run the SDN controller on an internal 
docker container which will live on a segregated VLAN provisioned from 
the switch and remote access, routing, access control and so on will be 
handled elsewhere. The potential deal breaker for me I guess is that 
Ubiqiti seem a bit like the Apple of wifi and seem a bit like they 
really, really want you to whole-heartedly buy into the whole 
stack/ecosystem: I don't _need_ any of their vertical integration or 
cloudy crap but I do _want_ their slick looking wifi management. But 
then I'm also looking at Microtik who seem like the anti-Ubiqiti.

Any thoughts? I'm not trying to do an end run around hard work here and 
I've obviously got a lot of reading to catch up on :] Advice or 
suggestions would be appreciated.

Cheers
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