An Insider’s View on Ubiquiti being a fraud
I talk as much smack about Ubiquiti as the next old-school wireless nerd around. The last thing I’d do, though, is underestimate the power of their users and community.
They came in, bottomed out our market, disrupted everything we all knew about point to point and point to multipoint microwave, then they set their sights on Wi-Fi.
They took the design, ease of use, and marketability of wireless and did to it what Apple did to the PC with one exception: they made it exceptionally lower priced than anything on the market.
If you don’t know anything about networking or wireless, I wouldn’t expect you to know ANY of that.
I met Robert Pera in about 2007. Nice guy, great ideas, and a desire to change the World. He sent me one of the first production units of the then-labeled PowerStation. I took it out to a Kentucky ISP and demoed ’em then I hung some on a tower in South Texas and ran them through the gauntlet.
They were sleek, functional, and ridiculously inexpensive. He sent me one of the first Nano stations. Same thing. “Canopy killers” as I later referred to them in a tradeshow booth in Vegas.
When I found out how much he wanted to charge for them, myself and everyone around me cautioned against it. No room for the channel, no margin to grow the company, and besides, he’d be leaving millions of dollars on the table. Did he listen? No. His business and the wireless broadband industry exploded because of it. The wireless industry as a whole got pushed to innovate, drop their pricing, and become more agile. The ripple effects are still being felt to this day.
Again, if you’re not in the industry, I wouldn’t expect you to know that. But if you are in the industry, or even if you just poke your head in and ask around, everyone knows it.
About that Ubiquiti Community comment
“Highly Engaged and loyal evangelists.”
We’re supposed to believe that people that buy routers people that buy access points are so obsessed with … to be evangelical to the point that they can avoid a sales force.. “That’s just a lie!!”
Oh man, this is where this guy loses any and all credibility. If he knew anything about Ubiquiti and their users he’d know that this is absolutely, almost insanely, accurate.
I hope for his sake the UBNT community doesn’t get ahold of any of his MAC addresses. I can’t imagine how bad his Wi-Fi access across North America would become for talking this much shit about the beloved $UBNT.
Anyone who has ever worked with a Ubiquti product or has been in the wireless industry can tell you that this scathing and just absolutely rude report by the Citron guys is a shot in the dark. Love UBNT or hate ’em, you gotta respect what they’ve been able to do.
Comparing them to NetGear? Really? Obviously this person has done no research into what Ubiquiti actually does.
Saying that FrontRow is a GoPro competitor? Not even close. Totally different product line.
Ripping someone apart to expose them and then going public and affecting their company, their investors, and their stock holders is a ballsy move and shouldn’t be done without a fair amount of research. It’s honestly a really shitty thing to do if you haven’t done your homework. This guy is nothing more than a bully and that sucks for everyone who listened to him and for everyone in our industry.
Haters gone hate I guess.
What’s In It For Him?
Now, the whole thing stinks of him trying to make some money off of knocking them off their pedestal, but what do I know. Could he be trying to buy some shares, get some recognition for his “research” group, or have an ulterior motive by riding the coat tails of the work done by Ubiquiti hoping they won’t strike back? I dunno. Are they really a fraud? I dunno.
One thing’s for sure though: I hope that this guy Left can show proof of what he’s talking about because if it’s one thing that Mr. Pera is good at, it’s protecting his brand.
