A few weeks ago @Wirednot lobbed a question to the internet with the familiar #WIFIQ tag:

It started off a pretty good conversation, that ended up with me receiving a box of gear from Ubiquiti to see what my impressions of their full suite of products would be.

I’m looking forward to getting this going so that I can get a great feeling of what the products can do, how they can do it, and when properly installed, what the benefit to the customer can be.

When Properly Installed…

So the @UBNT twitter account retweeted the above tweet and my timeline blew up. The 80k users following it started throwing hearts at my tweet, which is always fun. I jumped on the UBNT timeline to see what else they had retweeted lately and I about shit myself.

After seeing those tweets, I couldn’t scroll any longer and I had to fire up Blogger to post this…

In case you don’t understand the rage here:
Example 1: WHY WOULD YOU LAY AN AP ON A METAL COUNTER WITH AN ALUMINUM WALL BEHIND IT?

Example 2: WHY WOULD YOU PLACE AN OMNIDIRECTIONAL ANTENNA IN A CORNER?? MULTIPLE TIMES???

Example 3: A CLOSET? A FU*!ING CLOSET? WHY WOULD YOU MOUNT A WIRELESS DEVICE IN A CLOSET?

If you don’t know anything about wireless, think about this:
It’s like a light bulb. If you’re trying to get light to everyone in the room, where would you mount the light? IN THE CLOSET OF COURSE.

<deep breath>

Here’s My Problem With Ubiquiti

Whether or not the radios work, the software works, or they are capable products, they made everyone think that they could be a wireless professional. That gives wireless professionals a pretty bad name. When you’re trying to use the Wi-Fi in the restaurant where the AP is mounted in THE CLOSET and it doesn’t work, you blame the W-Fi. You don’t blame the AP vendor or the person who put it IN the closet, you blame the Wi-Fi!!

Now, when you have to sell wireless access to a business owner wireless equipment what do they naturally say “yeah, Wi-Fi sucks”. Thanks to the closet guy, that business owner is now jaded.

Help Make the LightBulbs Go Off, Please.

Now multiply that times Ubiquiti’s market share in the industry.
And when the @UBNT twitter handle tweets that garbage out to 80K followers, everyone thinks it’s OK to do that!

My advice, hey @UBNT, please encourage people to learn about wireless before they continue to do ridiculous stuff like this.

At the very least, throw a graphic in the your actually really, really, awesome packaging, that explains that Wi-Fi is like a light bulb: if you want good coverage, mount it it where you would a lightbulb trying to serve the room.

KTHX. Rant over.

Originally published on Blogger