Ubiquiti UniFi 6 Pro Acces Point Wifi 6 AP 5.3Gbps 300+ clients (U6-PRO), dual band

Product Information

With every foot of free space and every obstruction, a Wi-Fi signal attenuates and gets weaker. 5 GHz signals attenuate faster, and provide around half the range of 2.4 GHz. When deciding on how many access points you need, a good general rule is don’t expect 5 GHz coverage to extend further than 2 walls or 30 feet away. Some APs like the U6-LR extend this circle out a bit, but with the others APs, roaming to 2.4 GHz or getting low SNR 5 GHz performance is possible at the far edges. The U6-Pro is the newest of the three, and it is also a big step up from the U6-Lite. The U6-Pro also offers more transmit power, higher-gain antennas, more spatial streams, and more overall performance than the U6-Lite. The U6-LR and U6-Pro are both IP54-rated, meaning they are partially dust and splash resistant. They can be used in a protected outdoor area, like under a porch roof, but you wouldn’t want to install them in an unprotected outdoor area. The Ubiquiti UniFi Prooffers simultaneous dual-band operation with 2x2 and 3x3 MIMO technology. It has a range of up to 400 ft and 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports.The UAP Prois faster than the standard UAP model, offering speeds of up to 300 Mbps in the 5 GHz radio band and up to 450 Mbps in the 2.4 GHz radio band. The U6 Mesh has a horizontal antenna pattern to maximise coverage on the same level/floor, the others have a forward beam-pattern that is better suited to ceiling-mounting. Growing up in the early 2000s, I remember the Wi-Fi in our home being slow, unreliable but most of all extremely spotty. There were some areas of the house that were just dead zones. But after 2 decades, technology has advanced to the point where you can get speedy Wi-Fi that can stream multiple 4K streams simultaneously along with all the other traffic in a typical digital household

The U6-Lite is the cheapest and least-powerful Wi-Fi 6 AP UniFi offers. It has the least range and performance, but it also has the lowest price and smallest size. It’s the same size (and uses the same mount) as the older AC-Lite and nanoHD. It is not dust or water resistant, and should only be used indoors. The U6 Lite has a 1.3 Gbps aggregate throughput, the U6 LR has 3.0 Gbps, the U6 Pro and U6 Mesh both have 5.3 Gbps.For our comparison, I have excluded the U6 Enterprise because home users don’t really need the advanced features such as 2.5 GbE, 6 GHz support, 600 simultaneous user support, or the much higher price point. But if you are still interested in it, I will have a U6 Professional vs. U6 Enterprise comparison soon. Feature Comparison And, since the Ubiquiti U6-Pro supports 160MHz channel width, I tried to keep the interference to the minimum to see the maximum performance that the AP can reach. At closer range (5 feet), the QCN9024 is absolutely phenomenal, delivering an average of 934Mbps upstream and 625Mbps downstream. Ubiquiti U6-Pro vs Other WiFi 6 Access Points – 5GHz (80MHz) – 5 Feet – Upstream. Instead of a single U6 LR, you may be better off having two U6 Lite APs to ensure a stronger, consistently fast signal for almost the same cost. As the name implies, the U6-LR offers more range than the U6-Lite. The U6-LR has twice the spatial streams (2x2:2 vs. 4x4:4) in both bands, resulting in better beamforming and higher potential throughput. It is physically much larger, the same size as the AC-HD. The U6-LR is a step up in nearly every way, but it still has an older 802.11n-era 2.4 GHz radio and MediaTek chipset like the U6-Lite.

One UniFied Network: Option to create one large wireless network across multiple APs that lets users seamlessly roam.The UniFi Access Point (UAP) U6 family consists of 5 models: the U6 Lite, the U6 Pro, U6 Long-Range (LR for short), U6 Enterprise, and the U6 Mesh. Mesh networking simply means that the Wireless Access Points (WAP) can talk to each other instead of a central base station. This allows you to extend your Wi-Fi range considerably because each WAP can simply connect to the nearest WAP. This is called wireless up-link and is the term that UniFi also uses. So mesh networking does not make your Wi-FI faster, it is just a different way of connecting wireless access points together. Does the UniFi-6 support Mesh? Yes, all the UniFi 6 Access Points support mesh networking. Can I use the U6 Pro or U6 LR outdoors? When everything is working properly, then the LED will be solid blue and, before it’s adopted to the UniFi controller, it will be solid white. What’s very problematic is that Ubiquiti has advertised that the users would be able to set the color that they wanted (RGB), but they have removed that feature. I have no idea why because as I said, the single LED pales in comparison to the traditional array of LEDs anyway. Why not have some fun? There is a bump in the antenna gain of 0.5dBi for the 5GHz, while the transmit power is 22dBm as opposed to the 26dBm of the U6-LR, the platform is also different but is that enough to make a noticeable difference between the two models? There should be a difference, but I am not sure it’s going to be that steep, hence the small difference in terms of cost between the two models.

The U6 Lite is only dual-band (2.4 GHz and 80 Mhz channel-width), but the others also support the 160 MHz channel-width. Wi-Fi performance is hard to accurately capture. Before we cover my iPerf results, it’s important to understand what they do and do not say. iPerf is a tool for testing throughput on wired and wireless networks, but it is easy to misinterpret these numbers, or put too much importance on them. Using a public speed test server like fast.com or speedtest.net will almost always result in lower speeds. iPerf is a good way to get repeatable results and test the upper end of performance, but they don’t always reflect normal everyday use. I’ve seen this approach with lots of EnGenius access points, including the ECW230 and the latest WiFi 6E ECW336, and it works wonders for the heat management of compact access points. Ubiquiti still insists that their APs are suitable for outdoors, so there are no ventilation holes and you do get a silicone cover for the ports area, which means that the device will get hotter to the touch when it’s operational (due to the heat transfer), but there should be no risk of overheating. Ubiquiti U6-Pro Heat Management. The U6 Mesh can be placed on a table, wall-mounted or ceiling-mounted, but the others are designed to be wall or ceiling mounted only. You can of course place the others on a table but coverage may suffer.The AC-Mesh-Pro is an AC1750 Wi-Fi 5 AP, offering more performance than the non-pro model. It doesn’t have removable antennas, but instead comes with high-gain (8 dBi) antennas built-in. The AC-Mesh-Pro is big enough that it could act as a lunch tray. It is harder to hide, but the additional antenna gain provide impressive range and performance. The AC-Mesh-Pro can operated on standard 802.3af (15W) PoE, or with Ubiquiti’s 48V passive PoE. The U6 LR unsurprisingly has the best performance (speed and range) across both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, thanks to the highest signal strength and 4×4 MIMO on all bands.