The Ubiquiti Unifi
Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010Last friday (October 29th) my friend Ulf from Freifunk Berlin came to Rome. I went with him and other Ninux guys at the Ubiquiti conference.
All was about the presentation of new devices, and the real reason why all the Ninux guys went to the conference, was the free device that everybody was going to receive for free at the end of the day It is always good to have a bunch of free devices when you have to run a no profit wireless community network.
I did not really like the new ubiquiti strategy. Instead of focusing on hardware, they are trying to be a “System company”. They are developing software (free to use, but not free software) that is tightly binded to their products. So they are selling some good H.264 camera, but they push to use them with their software. Also a lot of hardware came out with propritery firmware extensions that brake the compatibility with other 802.11 products.
The worst in my opinion is the Unifi, the one they give as a gift at the end of the conference. They sell it as a “Enterprise Wifi System”, because together with the device there is a piece of software to configure a massive number of devices at once. But the device it self is no more than a fonera inside.
At home with Ulf we quickly got into the device with SSH, and we found a very old kernel, 2.6.15 if I remeber correctly. Also, because they want us to use their software to configure the device, there was not web interface right available
But no problem, sunday at the Fusolab we had Claudio already testing some patches to make OpenWRT Backfire running on the device… official support with the OpenWRT distribution is on its way !
Saverio