 Corsair Raptor K40 keyboard and M45 mouse are designed to provide best in class features and performance for gaming. Click now to learn more. Consumer grade Wi-Fi is poo. We all know it. But what could we really expect? It's like that whole, uh, how great do you expect the camera on your phone to be conversation all over again. A wireless router is not a real thing. It's a colloquial term. When you, what you call a wireless router is actually three pieces of hardware that are rolled into one. A router, a network switch, and a wireless access point. Then a team of highly trained monkeys develops the firmware, software, and UI, which is difficult enough when you're just trying to make all that stuff for one piece of hardware. Then they have to turn around and sell all of this for whatever consumer friendly price point they are targeting. Let's say $49.99. No wonder it's all poo. So I reached out to Wendell from Check Syndicate for help. Wendell, I said, save me from the poo. I'm not a plumber, he replied, to which I said, I know it's wireless poo. And Wendell descended from the heavens with a recommendation for me to try the Ubiquiti Unifi AC access point that you see right here in its pleasing brown box. So let's take a look at the hardware. It's got a pleasing ID that can be easily wall or ceiling mounted. It's nice and low profile and comes with all the hardware you need. Little plastic mounting plate right here, metal bracket as well as the screws and nuts that you're going to need for that. It's got a center LED ring in the middle that glows either white or blue and can be used for diagnostics. You can see whether or not it's connected to the network as well as as a device locator. So it'll flash blue if you tell it to through the software. So you can actually find where it is and identify which one is which if you're deploying a bunch of them. It's got internal antennas, so that helps with the pleasing look and also just as one fewer thing to set up. But don't worry, the range is still quite strong. And then when we flip it over to the bottom, we find two ethernet ports. There's nothing sort of too complicated here, guys. It doesn't support teaming or anything like that. But there's just a main and a secondary. And that's for fail over in case one of them outright dies. The cool thing about the ethernet ports, we don't really discover until we dig further into the box and find this guy right here. This is a POE injector or power over ethernet. What this allows you to do is place this pretty much anywhere you can get an ethernet cable. You don't have to worry about AC power because both power and data are going to be carried by the RJ45 cable. So all you do is plug this guy into a wall ethernet from here out to your switch or router. And then from here off to your access point. And the whole thing is taken care of. Very, very cool in terms of the actual specs for Wi-Fi. It supports up to 1300 megabit per second wireless AC with MIMO and a range of up to 400 feet. Although obviously both of those things won't be happening at the same time. So what are the main advantages of this product? Well, number one is the consumer friendly management software. And maybe that's actually why Wendell recommended it to me in particular. Anyway, more on the more on the management software later. The next one is seamless roaming between access points with their zero handoff feature. This is something that Ubiquiti talks about a lot. And it's great for applications like VoIP that are sensitive to network interruptions. That way, if you have multiple ones of these deployed like you often would in an enterprise environment, you can move between them and not have whatever it is you're doing interrupted. Although more on zero handoff in just a moment with respect to this one. It also offers endless expandability. So that whole thing about having lots of them and just plain higher performance. It's enterprise grade. This is something I observed personally. I am very, very happy with this product, even though it costs three hundred dollars. So let's move on to the software. It allows you to easily see the status of any given access point, including radio configuration, bandwidth monitoring, the clients that are connected to it and much more. The software for management works across huge installations, even multi site, like multi campuses and runs on just a Windows or Mac PC that is connected to the same network. They say on their site that it runs on Linux as well, but I didn't see a download for it. So you're my little me very there. You can even do things like upload little maps into the software. So when you're managing locations, you can be like, OK, well, I put one here and you can drag it around and you can map out your network that way. It supports automatic firmware upgrades. So it just will automatically upgrade the firmware of your access points. And it even supports cool stuff like a guest portal or hotspot that includes support for charging for it as well, which is kind of neat. Now, this whole thing may have sounded like a paid product placement or commercial, but it's actually quite the opposite. I bought two of these and I paid for them because I am just so sick of dealing with consumer grade wireless solutions. Even my RTN 66U, which is the best I've used so far for range and signal consistency, isn't as good as this and it's just not good enough. I mean, my house isn't that big. It's twenty three hundred square feet, which isn't huge. And a single router just doesn't cut it. This much better. And it's funny because it was when I first installed it, I wasn't that impressed. It's actually difficult to quantify the performance difference with simple tools like Wi-Fi Analyzer for Android or just like looking at the reception bars. And I don't actually have any strong AC clients that I could use to really test out the max throughput. But what I can say is that when it comes to real world running around my house, streaming video or using Nvidia Game Stream or browsing the Internet, this AC access point comes out on top. It's simple to use. It's seamless to deploy. It's easy to manage. And it just plain works mostly. The one thing that disappointed me is that zero handoff feature that's all over their site. It's not implemented on the AC version. I was I was quite disappointed because while seamless, which this one does support, is enough for a buffered video playback like YouTube or for web browsing to be completely uninterrupted, like you'd never even notice that you're moving from one to another. It is not enough to stream a game on shield as you move between access points. And I did pick up two of these hoping that I would be able to have perfect reception all over my house and be completely uninterrupted. No, it drops when you cross a threshold and you will have to manually reconnect. But once you do, it is back up and running. They do say the firmware upgrade is coming at some point, though, even with that complaint. Thumbs up for this product. It's expensive. But my expectation is that I should only be upgrading my Wi-Fi hardware when I legitimately need a speed increase again rather than when I get tired of the BS from my current setup, which is what happened to me many times in the past. I mean, think about this. OK, this is three hundred dollars. But how many routers that cost a hundred bucks or one hundred and fifty bucks have you been through in the last year or two? Is it time for a new approach? What do you think? Leave your comments. Let me know if this has changed the way you think about networking technology, especially wireless, because it's just mostly terrible. You can leave those comments under the video or you can check out the Linus Tech Tips forum. We'll have a link in the video description. Remember, guys, as always, like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you thought it was poo, just like consumer wireless routers. And as always, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.