Ubiquiti UniFi Wi-Fi 7 Access Points: Full Portfolio Overview & Deployment Guide

So I just wanna start with some of the wifi seven developments that we've done, some of the hardware stuff that we've been doing over the past year. So as Craig said, we've been busy. Our big announcement last year was the introduction of the enterprise wifi seven aps.

These things are absolute monsters, high-end radios, 10 gig up links, a whole new industrial design for us. Redundant links. These things are great including E seven regular down there, your ceiling mount indoor ap, all with a FC, your campus outdoor, A FC directional tri band, ap, and then audience coming soon.

Uh, five gigahertz dual six. That's gonna be a monster place in furled U-W-B-X-G, including, uh, software selectable beam width for the antennas. But we learned a lot through developing these.

Like I said, it was a whole new architecture for us. Whole new ideas, things like providing high availability and keeping that high availability story of our enterprise lineup going all the way out to the access points. But there's another thing to learn about developing aps, about making hardware ourselves and that is that WiFi's become rather complicated over time.

And we start with our original UFO design here. The ones we all know and love, we started in about 2010 with the first ones, but over the success of generations, those aps got physically larger and larger. Some of that was antenna optimization of course, but a lot of it was thermal management, managing the increased power draw of more and more powerful SOCs until finally the wifi seven aps.

If you compare U seven PRO to some of the original UAPs like an AC Pro, it's a much bigger physically ap. So when we came to do our next gen of aps came to expand our wifi seven portfolio. We went back to the drawing board, but the lessons that we learned from E seven and that's when we introduced U seven Pro xg, a whole new shape, a whole new design for us.

We optimized every part of it. We optimized the back plate to have that sort of stepped pattern for heat dissipation. We were able to upgrade the nick to 10 G because we suddenly had that much more room to play with in terms of thermal envelope.

And we kept the same great performance, same great ship sets we were using with U seven Pro and Pro Max. And so that really completed our wifi seven ceiling mount roadmap. Here we have U seven light starting at $99 and then going up to the pro XG and XGS at 2 99.

These aps, they are all omni all ceiling mount. Uh, in fact the promax still uses the same mount or is still compatible with, uh, some of the older mounting for something like U six Pro or even some of the mounts that we used for a pro A CHD. So super quick to swap those out, but of course we needed to fill out more.

So that's when we started getting into some of the specialty lineups. We have use of an in-wall and pro wall, our two wall-mounted aps for, you know, hospitality applications or specialty applications. So use of an in-wall is a dual band ap, two ports of two and a half gig on the bottom, uh, including one with POE pass throughs.

So power a desk, phone, uh, power, something in room, super useful. And then U seven pro wall adds a six gigahertz radio drops a switch, but U seven pro wall. I also really like for, uh, sensitive applications.

You, if you wanna make your room look really nice, you wanna hide away the ap, you can get a paintable cover, you can get a paintable recess mount for it, tuck it away in the wall. Looks super nice. And then finally, based on feedback from our customers, including people in this room, we expanded into outdoor APS and connector aps.

So U seven outdoor was our first really big foray going back into an AP with an integrated directional antenna, but also external antenna connections, whether you want to use the omnis that are included in the box or any dual band, uh, tighter sector antenna that you might wanna deploy. And then U seven fro outdoor. I know our community's been really excited about this.

We've been promising this one for months. Uh, but we're finally ready to put that on sale in the coming weeks. Um, this adds a built-in directional six gigahertz antenna to the mix.

A FC certified, nice little adjustable mount. It's a really great AP for deploying outdoors or getting your feet wet with going wifi seven and six gigahertz outside. And then finally capping it off as the enterprise lineup.

So all of these aps, they're four by four and six gigahertz. They're 10 gig redundant links. What makes them all different is their antenna pattern and where they're intended to be deployed.

So E seven, that's our indoor powerhouse. That is our, that is our big indoor AP with a FC capability. So that of course means if you're in an area you, it's supported, you can get that extra six DB that we all want for standard power.

Um, E seven campus and audience are outdoor aps. So those have integrated directional antennas, different radios. 4 gigahertz still deployed.

Um, but E seven audience is meant for those high density, uh, five gigahertz, six gigahertz clients. But E seven campus and audience have another trick up their sleeve, which is prism filtering. I talked about this at WLPC.

Prism filtering is a patented technology that we brought over from our Air Max lineup. Uh, we use this for our point-to-point links to try and cut out neighboring interference from adjacent channel interference. When you're building a tower with a bunch of point-to-point links, a CI is gonna be un unavoidable, right?

Same deal with putting a bunch of outdoor aps maybe on the corner of a building you might be at at risk for some a CI. So we added in hardware filtering that intercepts the incoming signal, brick walls it, and then amplifies it back up to the incoming radio. So above and beyond whatever mitigations are in place on the radio itself.

In practical terms, what does this mean? So we put this in our lab. We wanted to simulate what it could do if we had a 40 megahertz channel.

So a reasonable deployment for, for outdoor. Maybe, you know, if you're not in an urban setting, maybe you're more suburban, you add in an adjacent channel, interfere. I believe this was, yeah, this was below 1 49.

I don't think this was 1 65. Um, and it just kills the throughput as you would expect. That's what a CI does.

But when you turn on the PRISM filtering, we're talking a 60%, a hundred percent plus improvement in throughput with a real client just from our hardware filtering. This is on all the time. There's no configuration needed, but campus and audience, when you get ready to deploy them outdoors, they have this filtering ready to go.

And that's just part of the story that we have with our wifi seven features. So MLOI talked about MLO last year, sort of how the r and d was going. Now I can say it's finally generally available for all of our aps, all of our wifi seven stuff.

We have our M-U-O-F-D-M-A that's all fully working. Uh, six gigahertz including a FC support on the relevant aps, including the indoor one. E seven is fantastic.

How the way a FC works with that AP is if you're in an area and you can do 36 DB E-R-E-I-R-P on a channel, it'll let you. But if you're in an area where you can't, it's still recognized as an indoor ap. So it'll drop to 30, no problem.

You're not gonna have that risk of running a really low TX power just because you turned on A FC. And of course we also have 4 96 4,096 qualm. We all in the room know that 4,096 qum is lovely in a lab setting, but in the real world, good luck, especially as six gigahertz gets more and more congested.

I actually went to, walked around San Francisco last week and I saw plenty of six gigahertz SSIDs popping up. So we had a nice green field for a while, but it's gonna get congested probably the next two, three years. And finally, static preamble puncturing is also working.

So that's also live on our aps when they first boot, when you set a new channel, they're gonna do a quick background scan. They're gonna find if there are any strong interferers way above the noise floor and then puncture them out. That's five and 60 hertz live today.

Notice I said static puncturing, nobody has dynamic puncturing working yet. That's something that we are working on. But again, that's also client support dependence.

So TBD and how useful that's going to be Now. Good aps are nothing without strong switching to back to them up. And we've been very busy with it, with switching lately.

If you've kept pace with our product announcements. So just to walk through really quickly, the switches that we always recommend for doing a new deployment, start with Pro Max. 5 gig for doing like U seven Pro, pro Max, those aps, you can step it up to pro xg, get a ton of 10 gig copper, get up to 90 watt POE delivery on the ports.

And then finally, if you want that high availability story, you step up to our enterprise tier that not only gives you that 2,150 watts of POE, you're running two 40 volts. Don't worry, we're not gonna overload your circuits. Um, but it also has hotspot fans and PSUs and then that compliments our rack mount gateways as well, all the way from our UDM Pro, which has been around for a number of years.

I, uh, personally bought one before I ever worked for ubiquity and it served me well all through this time, all the way up to our EFG, which Craig introduced last year. And with its hot swap PSUs SSL inspection, it's truly a next gen firewall. And then finally we have our new compact models.

These have been new in the past year, so we started out with ultra, a little gigabit model, perfectly great little, uh, you know, branch office gateway all the way up to UCG fiber, which is over five gig IPS throughput on a little $280 box. It's, it's absolutely incredible for doing any sort of deployment where a rack's not possible or you just don't have the room for it. But a question that I always get when I have to jump into pre-sales or I have to jump into product education is how do I deploy unify?

How do I get started with this? So I always recommend a cloud gateway or something to host unify. You can of course set it up yourself, run it on your operating system of choice.

But it's easier to get started with one of these because you can just set it up with Bluetooth on your phone. You usually add in some sort of switching. The cloud gateway fiber that I added here has one P OE plus port on it.

You know, just run one little AP for a bench setup or something. But if you're gonna expand, you're gonna need a switch. And then finally our access points.

So I'd like to walk through some sample deployments just to show what we'd recommend today. So if you're doing a small office, I'd start with our UCG max, our flex switch and a promax. 5 gig backbone that we've really democratized over the past year.

This will do, this will be an incredible performer for years to come. And you still get all of the great new features that we've done in our software and all of the great new wifi seven innovations. But when you start expanding to a larger office, suddenly you have a 19 inch rack to play with.

Step it up to a promax 24, step it up to a UDM Pro Max. Now you've got some gateways that are capable of doing about five gig IPS throughput maybe a little bit more. Now you're talking some serious throughput when you start dealing with a lot of people working at at the same time.

But when you deal with a warehouse, you say, you know, I'm liking it in my office, but what can I do about directionality? This was an area, like I said, it came up a lot last year, both talking to customers, talking to you guys was you guys don't have anything directional or the last thing you made directional was like AC mesh back a long, long time ago. And so this is where E seven campus might work.

If you had sort of a more open space, think like more of an airport terminal, big manufacturing center, big open space where the 90 degree beam width might help you. But if you need something more specialized, U seven PRO outdoor with its connector eyes, antennas is good to go, especially if you're deploying them in, um, temperature sensitive environments. I know a lot of people like to put the aps outside of something like a freezer and then cable, the antennas inside again, perfect use.

Yeah. Since you've got an AP with the connectors there, do you also make the antennas? Yeah, we have an, we have an omni antenna in the box and we are actually exploring other antenna options that would be first party, but really any third party antenna would will work just fine.

You can set custom antenna gains in our software, so just match up the spec and you're good to go. And then of course, like I said, for hospitality, you can swap out those specialized aps for our in-wall series, but we have customers that want to go bigger, especially education. You know, education can be a small scale as you know, one of these office setups, but it can go very large.

This was an example deployment that we did recently for a big high school. I believe they wanted to have, uh, redundant gateways. So we have our shadow mode functionality, that's VRRP, stateful failover takes about three to five seconds to fail over between them, but definitely good enough to keep, you know, a voice call going Skype call, whatever, uh, works just fine.

Mc lag at the core level on our enterprise aggregation switches, this is super slick functionality, you know, whether you need to connect servers, nvs, whatever, you know, one switch goes down, it keeps on rolling I is MC lag only available on the enterprise switches or does it go into the, the lower end, uh, products As well? It's only available in the enterprise switches for now, but later in this year we're going to introduce switch stacking at the access layer. So we're gonna have a new SKU coming out called ECSS ES for stacking.

That's gonna allow you to connect multiple switches with a hundred gig interlinks so that way you can build in that fault tolerance at the edge as well. And of course today you can use link aggregation or you can use STP blocking or however else you wanna architect your edge layer. This is a virtual stack, not a physical stack cable.

So we will have physical stacking later in this year. Okay. Okay.

Yep. And of course, dual links to your enterprise aps. And then finally it can keep expanding the whole story of unify is scalability.

You can start out small and continue growing as your needs go. So this is an enterprise campus network. So we have, you know, our two primary gateways, but we keep adding layers of aggregation switches as you add on another building or as you, uh, expand your network or as you suddenly just need more ports and you can just keep building and building out and unify really is unlimited scalability.

But I've talked a lot about hardware, but Andrew's gonna tell you a lot about the software that powers all of this. Um, but before I let him take over any questions from you all? Yeah, this could be an opportunity, Tom, to take a, I guess a snapshot of a superlink and, you know, what you're hearing from customers out there, you know, supporting IOT capabilities, et cetera.

Yeah, no, that's super important for us. So the, the superlink portfolio is sort of on our protect side. We unveiled this, it's a whole new, uh, wireless, uh, thing that we're developing.

It's not wifi based, it's actually LoRa based. Alright. And by doing LoRa of course, you get the battery life advantages, you get the range advantages, and we're launching a whole family of sensors, relays, I think there's even a smoke alarm planned.

So it allows us to bring in a bunch of IOT into the Unified Protect family, into our physical security family, um, all tied in with just great battery life and a nice ecosystem that will be, uh, open via API. So you'll be able to of course, query all those, bring them into any application you want. But, um, I don't really have much more to say about that other than our iot roadmap or we have plenty of cool stuff that's coming that I can't talk about yet.

But.