UbiQuiti UDM

My home network has been neglected over the years with just my ISP Wi-Fi router and the odd Wi-Fi router to take over Wi-Fi and add Ethernet ports. My house is partially hardwired but none of the points suit current locations of equipment nor appeals to have them on show. Being tech savvy I knew full enterprise equipment was going to be overkill but I needed a robust system due to the ever increasing Wi-Fi devices in my house. 3 kids, wife and myself and smart IoT devices meant 20+ devices. I had purchased recently the Google Wi-Fi mesh solution with 3 points but lacked customisation and the backhaul network is not great when on different floors of my house with solid brick walls etc. I had thought about a switch and multiple access points dotted around the house, but would either need a PoE switch or powered APs. Did I want a managed or unmanaged switch. My conundrum continued for several months. I work in buildings which are littered with APs and I have access to server rooms and know the kinds of kit you can buy. Everything overkill. I knew of Ubiquiti and there line up of kit and Unifi seemed the best solution for me. I didn’t want multiple boxes (the wife) nor the cost of them. Although extending my ISO coax to my loft is doable, and may still consider but they’ll charge me if I have to call them out to a fault. So the Unifi Dream Machine was my solution, well, a good part of it. Move the ISP box to point of entry to my house, pop it into modem mode. Take external Ethernet from Port1 to outside around the front and back in, hidden behind skirting boards to UDM WAN port. From Port1 of UDM back outside with second cable up to my loft to a UAP via a PoE injector. Drop the cable through the ceiling at the top of my stairs. This will be the AP for upstairs and front of house IoTs and mobile devices, whilst all media/lounge equipment via the UDM. Fairly streamlined compared to full rack mounts and less patchy the mesh Wi-Fi. Total cost less than £450 for devices and cables etc. It works. The Unifi GUI isn’t anything I haven’t come across before ad there are plenty of tutorials online/YouTube etc. setup was easy either via the iOS app of via web browser IP or unifi.ui.com. Pros Setting up VLANS to separate different types of equipment. IoTs on one, kids iPads on another and medial devices and work devices on others. Great threat management Good GUI The wife requires a secure connection for work, although she connects via a work VPN, this separates her laptop from all devices. I did once connect to her laptop by mistake and saw stuff I shouldn’t have. This stops mistakes. The kids iPads are setup fairly well via iOS but this gives better security over what they access as I sometimes forget to enable restrictions after I’ve used their iPads. Again, keeps them safe from getting attacks. IoT devices can be easily accessed/hacked should anyone want. Although my network is more for leisure than business, this allows me to isolated these easily hacked devices from all other devices and put firewalls up to stop them access other LANs. Assigning dedicated VLANs and Wi-Fi bands to each group is great. Anything that can happily run on 2.4ghz means my media devices don’t get bogged down on 5ghz. The fan noise on startup is just that, ramps up full and then drops down to quieter than a whisper. Cons I’m constantly looking at the GUI as the information of my network is amazing. For home enthusiasts to SMBs, I’d recommend Ubiquiti Unifi Dream Machine.

Packed full of features and outstanding performance and wi-fi range. Techies will get those most out of the features and be able to appreciate the bang for buck when compared to other small business setups, the UDM has it all in one box. Yes, there is no wifi6 but to me that isn’t important, not for a few years at least for home. Easy to setup and configure, despite my comment about techies - just download the app, plug it in and follow the instructions. I have mine setup to FTTP (300/50) and it doesn’t miss a beat. Been installed for 3 weeks now and hasn’t dropped out once. GUI is simple to use and, again, use the app to comprehensively monitor your entire network. Bought another three for work, ticks all the boxes.

Cannot say how impressed I am with the Ubiquiti devices. I have ordered both the UAC AC LR and a UDM as the base router to replace my struggling virgin media setup. With the UDM serving the downstairs where the Virgin router is (now setup as just a modem) and the UAC serving the upstairs. Was very easy to setup and configure. The management of UniFi products are fantastic, maybe a bit overkill for those that want plug and play. But for some like myself who has an IT background, this system is brilliant. Goodbye to those horrible dead spots in the house and hello to great stability, greatly increased signal and throughout and fantastic device and system management. Not the cheapest to buy but now when both myself and wife are working from home, as well as 2 children having home online lessons it has been a saving grace. Cannot speak highly enough about it.

Well the device is excellent and is a very good compromise between better then normal purchased home router with good enterprise type of elements but not at the price that will break the bank. I am not sure whos fault it is but the device came with no UK plug so I am going to assume it was Amazon doing a european / american import of the device but that is just an asthetic thing as I could not get a white cable with plug so will just buy a uk plug and wire up the cable. My only issue with the device itself is you had to have an online account to setup the device but once setup you can create an offline acccount and disable the online account. Also would have been nice to have a manual even if in PDF format explaining all the various options that are avaliable to you as a user.

A really nice product - interesting (and cool) design: - easy to set up, just switch on, download the app on mobile (or via web browser) and that's pretty much it - provides a great insight into network performance traffic, usage, etc. - reasonably quiet (you can hear the fan upon startup but beyond that it's almost silent) - well made, feels like a quality product. I would advise considering this if you want a router and firewall in one device (together with some excellent network configuration features - e.g. different wifi networks, etc.). It's much easier to set up than other Unifi devices. The only physical downside is the small number of ethernet ports - if you want more then you'll need to invest in a network switch. My setup is BT smart hub (home broadband), then the Dream Machine ("UDM") and then a Unifi network switch which worked really well. Most of my wifi devices connected directly to this UDM - I had 3 wifi networks - the main one, one for IoT devices and one for guests. My network switch has a couple of Unifi Access Points, all of which worked really well with the UDM (I used the UDM to manage everything). So...unfortunately I ran into an issue I wasn't expecting - the UDM doesn't work so well with Sonos music products - I have a SONOS system (wired and wireless) and I had all sorts of problems with it. One of the causes was the iPhone IP masking feature that Apple really introduced (very easy to switch off so not a problem) but it just wasn't happy. There are various workarounds out there but it looks like it involves advanced config/ssh which is too complex for me. In the end I switched off the UDM and Sonos was back to normal and worked perfectly. Overall highly recommended, not much more than the Unifi USG so work serious consideration - providing you don't have a Sonos system!

I had been using a Security Gateway, AC Pro, and a Raspberry Pi as a Cloud Key previously but eventually decided to put up the dosh for an all-in-one unit, and I'm very glad that I did. LOOKS The unit is small, quite a bit smaller than I thought it'd be. But it looks clean, so much so that I took it out of my network cab and placed it on a cabinet. There's quite a bright blue light on top, which will flash or change colour depending on the state of the UDM. If you find the light annoying it can be disabled via the console. SETUP The setup was surprisingly smooth, so much so that I was able to complete the entire process on my phone! By the time I had finished the process on my phone the unit was fully configured and there was very little for me to do on my PC besides just renaming devices. As I previously already had a Security Gateway I did have the option of exporting and importing a backup, but I opted to start fresh. PERFORMANCE It's not Wi-Fi 6 but with the equivalent of a Nano HD inside I found that it's more than powerful enough. And the unit itself is strong enough to provide coverage all over the house! The signal is still strong upstairs so I've been able to sell off my old AP. ISSUES Everything with the UDM has been smooth sailing, so I'm quite hard-pressed to think of anything to complain about. The only thing I've noticed is that if I'm downloading something and then attempt to log onto the console, the fans on the unit will kick up to 100%. It's not too much hassle as I'm rarely on the console for very long, but it's something to keep in mind if noise would be an issue for you. ANYTHING ELSE? I'm really pleased with the unit, and I hadn't realised how much nicer having everything under the one dashboard was. Updates are completely automatic (although you can change these settings), and backups are too. I never have to restart it, never have to check on it, it just chugs along.

Having used Unifi Access Points at work and seen how well they have worked and how easy they have been to configure, when I needed to improve the Wi-Fi at home, I decided to go with the standard Dream Machine. I was already using a BT G.Fast modem so it was a simple matter of fitting the UDM and then configuring it for my BT connection. Immediately I had better Wi-Fi through most of my home (I still had a dead spot for an outside camera) and have been able to get near full speed virtually everywhere too. The biggest benefit to me though is that I have been able to configure multiple Wi-Fi networks and separate my IOT devices from the main network. This should improve the security of the network as IOT devices can no longer interfere with my PC's and storage devices - important given how poor IOT device security has been in the past. The web interface and app are great and give so much information along with the ability to lock down use based on time and data content - provide router based parental features and block those sites that most wouldn't want to go to regardless of age (like known malware sites). I have since added a U6 Lite AP as well (was amazingly simple as it just needed plugging in and adding when it was detected by the UDM) which has resolved my black spot issue too and added Wi-Fi6 to my lounge as well (not that I stressed Wi-Fi5 though). For anyone looking for more than what the ISP router supplies, I would recommend going for Unifi (or perhaps the sister Amplifi consumer brand).

The Dream Machine is almost a very great router, with an excellent feature set, but it has two major problems: 1) The documentation is sparse and what little does exist is terrible: I can't think of an equivalent product whose documentation is so poor. Fortunately, much of the configuration is somewhat obvious if you're familiar with networking terminology and concepts. However, there are some very quirky bits that are close to unguessable. For example, I had to find a user submitted YouTube video to work out how to set-up multiple wireless networks: without it, I'd probably have spent hours randomly pressing buttons until I found the correct sequence of interlocking parts. For a £30 device this might be tolerable, but this device is over £300, and that should pay for someone to document at least the major features properly. 2) It ships with a EU plug and a cheap, crap UK travel adapter that doesn't sit properly and from which you will occasionally see a little blue arc, which is worrying. This is illegal, for a very good reason. If it wasn't for these two issues, I'd rate this 5 stars. Because of #1 I'd rate it 3.5 stars; because of #2, I rate it 1 star. Ubiquiti and Amazon should be ashamed that they keep selling such an expensive device with an illegal plug.