Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine | UDM-US

Let me start by saying I have been a strong advocate for Ubiquiti products for a number of years. I support multiple installations so when I was installing a system in my house I went straight to their products.

Unfortunately, my experience with this been poor at best and I am looking to replace it after only a week or two. Signal strength is weak and overall performance is sub-standard.

Full disclosure, I purchased this via the Ubiquiti direct site and not Amazon. That was another big mistake. I asked about swapping it out for a different system and was told the UBNT return policy states that as soon as you open the product it cannot be returned. What a short sighted policy that leaves a long term customer with a sub-standard product.

I will never buy another one of their products via their direct site and will seriously think twice about buying them at all.

I strongly recommend looking to another option, steer clear of this one.

This product has a set of features missing compared to the security gateway. NAT rules, OpenVPN client, dynamic dns with Cloudflare, disabling SSH password auth, and multiple WAN addresses are not available at this time. Basically config.gateway.json that is referenced in a lot of Unify documentation is not available. Support was unresponsive. I purchased this directly from Ubiquity before it was available on Amazon and since I opened the plastic wrap, the company is refusing to take it back.

Also, the wifi in the dream machine underperforms my AP-AC-Lite – Just being one room away from the dream machine drops the signal to -80.

I tried to love it but I really can’t. Here are the issues:

1. My HP printer sleeps 99% of the time. It loses wifi with this new router (it is perfectly fine with the old one). No matter what settings I tweaked and how long I spent with their “support”, they could not resolve this. So I installed my older router as an access point to resolve this issue.
2. I noticed that one of my wireless security cameras would constantly disconnect, despite being located at most 20 feet away from the router.
3. The last drop was that my Linux server / NAS box would lose connectivity unexpectedly while being connected via ETHERNET!!! After I spent days trying to figure out the issues I tracked it down to the router. I plugged it into the older router (the one I configured as a 2.4Ghz access point and turned off 2.4Ghz on this “dream” machine) and server stopped acting up.
4. The “simply powerful network” slowed down to 50-70Mbits in my bedroom that is 15 feet away from the router. It would give me 900Mbps – 1.7Gbps only in the direct visibility 5-10 feet away or in the next room behind the wall. So what is the use of this “cool router” ???
5. Configuration is yet another story. If you are used to a simple web interfaces (or something like DD-WRT), you will be surprised how one can convolute the settings and hide them under different “terms” and “names” so it takes you hours to figure out how to do a simple task (one example: assign a static DHCP IP rule based on a MAC address).

The symptoms of #1 and #3 were very similar in a way that the device (printer and server) would report the correct IP address and the wifi or ethernet interfaces up but there was not physical connectivity to them whatsoever.

So today I gave up and off it goes back to Amazon.

P.S. I took me literally 15 minutes to configure my older router back to my old settings and I was relieved that I don’t have to jump through hoops to make it all work. Wifi speed of 600Mbps is enough for most of my needs at this moment and my critical devices are still connected via 1Gbps ethernet. Adios Dream Machine …

I will update this review if there are problems later on…
I bought this router after being disenchanted with a series of consumer-grade wireless routers. They all worked fine – for the first several months. I last used a Netgear 6400v2 and have an attached USB-3 drive which I used for backups of my computers and to store media files for my Plex server. Then, like all it’s predecessors, it started disconnecting from the internet and not even letting me log in to the router. The attached drive became unreachable at times. These problems were separate and unpredictable. I got sick of my wife calling me to tell me that there was no internet.

Ubiquiti makes enterprise-grade networking devices. They have really just entered the consumer (or “prosumer”) market with the Dream Machine. I had high hopes for this and have been really happy with the setup and deployment so far. The wireless access point is strong enough to not need any satellite access points in my house. All my devices are getting strong wireless signals. I converted my old router to a switch, and now use it just to connect the network drive to the LAN. It seems to be up for that task so far – saving me the expense of a NAS device.

The configuration controller program is very flexible and secure. You can turn on 2-factor authentication (via Google authenticator on your phone) which will lock out anyone trying to access the network controller even if they know the password. It works fine in it’s default setting, but allows you to make many customizations including combining the 2.4 and 5 Ghz wireless networks into a single SSID. This allows new and old wireless clients to talk on the same network.

At Ubiquiti’s advice, I bought a good power conditioner to protect my networking equipment from voltage irregularities (Furman PST-8D) , and also lightning shielded the lot of it with L-Com grounded surge protectors.