Ubiquiti NanoBeam AC Gen2 2-Units 5GHz CPE NBE-5AC-Gen2 airMAX ac Bridge High-Performance with Dedicated Management Radio

Love ubiquiti products! Customer support is not what it used to be but still love the products. We run a slew of ubiquiti products, from Airfibre radios, a range of NANOBEAM products, down to the ubiquiti Amplifi routers, we use about 90% ubiquiti products because of reliability.

Amazing product once I got it working its perfect. I have a workshop 100 yards from home and my internet in the shop is super fast.Install was not easy and I had to use a tech service to install it.But if you are good with tech I’m sure it will be a breeze.Bottom line I would recommend this to anyone who needs their internet to extend to another building.

I bought these to solve a specific problem.My garage office is 90 feet from the house. I’d been using a range extender but I generally only got about 100Mbits on the range extender, which was not too bad, but the bigger problem was that I’m in a dense WiFi area and found my connection knocked out enough to be annoying. Initially my plan was to trench and bury Cat6A wires, but the sprinkler system made that more of a problem than I wanted to deal with immediately.I have a pair of these beaming between the House and Garage. I generally get a solid 200Mbits now and nothing knocks it out with deauth protection enabled. So all-in-all it’s a win for the effort and price.I’m running a 40MHz channel. In theory, switching to an 80 MHz channel should double my throughput, but the reality is that 80 MHz is actually slightly worse for me. I suspect that this is primarily because of the locally crowded WiFi spectrum.The power levels these things put out are actually too high at this short of a distance and tend to overdrive the receiver (and maybe neighbors). I found that by selecting a U-NII-1 band channel (36-64), the lower power restrictions reduced the receive levels to just barely overdriving the receiver. It would be nice if the transmit power levels could be reduced further, but currently only -4 db reduction is supported.Power is supplied by the included *“passive”* poe injector. It’s important to note the word *“Passive”* . This is a 24 volt passive poe that is *NOT* compatible with a standard poe switch. Standard poe (also known as ‘active poe”) is 48 volts. Plugging this into a standard poe switch will roast it! You must use the supplied 24 volt injector or purchase a converter adapter, which ironically costs more than the injector.Independent of the product, I still had to run CAT6a wires through walls and attic to complete connections on both sides. Originally I had intended mounting both dishes inside the attics and shooting through the walls. The power levels could readily have handled it, but there’s a lot of electronics integrated into the little dome and both attics easily top 100 degrees F in the summer so I opted to mount them outside.Which reminds me, the last leg of CAT6a from the Attic junction box to the outside dome should (I forgot) be UV sunlight resistant cable.

Set this up at the Sister's farmers market. Was able to setup a remote POS out in the pumpkin patch. Setup was super easy and instructions were intuitive.

Works perfectly as described

If you are looking for a consumer level device for a wireless bridge, these are a great option. They are pretty easy to deploy, the user interface is robust for such an inexpensive piece of gear, the documentation is mediocre, but if you know basic networking, you'll be fine.If you are a business, and any down time matters, buy a pro level system. First, not everyone spec's bandwidth the same. There is a world of difference between "up to 470+ Mbps" is aggregate, not true, full duplex like most pro level systems, which are now mostly up to 1 Gig systems. There is a world of difference in the build quality, available options, and life span of the product. For example, the Ubiquity products are plastic, light and fragile, the pro level systems are metal, heavy, and robust. Pro level systems are essentially waterproof, these are water resistant. (You can improve their water resistance by placing a little outdoor rated silicone along the seams & at the cable's point of entry.The Ubiquity's, for me, average about a 2 year life span, but are so inexpensive, it's cheap to replace them. I keep a pair for emergency backup for my Customers. The pro level products last about 5 times as long, some more. The pro level products are upgradeable with features like Automatic Coding & Modulation, 256 bit encryption, or bandwidth upgrades via software license.I have been in business for years selling & installing these products. The install costs for both pro level systems & these are not too far apart. You still need outdoor rated cables (Cat 5e or cat 6), lightning protection, mounts, plus configuration, installation, alignment, and testing. The pro level product will be more expensive, typically $4000 and up, depending on which features & bandwidth you purchase. Mounts are FAR better, as well as performance, and lifespan.The question becomes, how expensive is it to your business if you lose the link? If you are a consumer looking to connect a detached garage, shop, or out building, or a small, cash strapped business, or the application is non-critical, these may be a good fit. Some clients even have a plan to just replace them every couple years, or buy a second pair for backup.If you have a critical application or if a link outage will cost you thousands in lost productivity, wages, and Customer satisfaction buy the better, pro level product. You get the Capital Equipment write off, so the cost differential shrinks, and you won't be explaining to everyone why you cannot design, produce or ship product for a week while waiting for service, a replacement system, and reinstallation, plus the cost of that service.

These we're not US based.

We installed these for an office that sits across an open field (as in 100% line-of-sight) and attained a 97-97.5% signal strength and yet, we still have sporadic and intermittent network connectivity even in the most ideal of weather/conditions. It's a great idea but Ubiquiti didn't hit a homerun with this one like they've done with all the other products we've purchased from them for our IT needs over the years.