Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 6 years and 11 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

I’ve been pretty happy with my UniFi UAP, but it never quite reached to the far corners of the house, and the fact that it only had a 100mbps uplink kinda bothered me. So this weekend I replaced it with a new Ubiquity UniFi UAP-AC-LR.

The UAP-AC-LR has 3×3 MIMO radios in the 2.4 GHz band, 2×2 MIMO radios in the 5 GHz band, and supports 801.11ac/n/a/g/b with a (theoretical) range of 600ft. Like the UAP, it uses a 24V passive PoE connector for power. It’s slightly smaller but less flat than the UAP, so I had to remove the UAP’s mounting bracket on the ceiling and install the one that came with the UAP-AC-LR. At first I also made the mistake of not replacing the PoE adapter so after connecting the new device for the first time it only connected to my switch at 100mpbs. Once I used the adapter that came with the new access point, I got the full gigabit uplink.

Since I was already running the UniFi Controller software, adding the new AP to the network was relatively painless. It appeared in the controller and I just had to “adopt” it and it started broadcasting my SSIDs. I unplugged the UAP and all of the my devices switched over to the new access point (some of them using the newly available 5GHz band and the iPhones using wireless AC).

I didn’t feel like getting rid of the old UAP just yet, so I ran some ethernet cable through my attic (again!) and set it up on the other side of the house from the UAP-AC-LR. Both APs appeared in the controller and in my tests my iPhone would connect to the nearest access point. I did have one IoT device that refused to connect to the UAP in its new location, even though it was closer. I worked around that by creating a separate SSID just on the UAP and then connected that device to that new SSID. I also learned that my older Dropcams still won’t connect to a hidden SSID. They connect just fine while the SSID is being broadcast, but as soon as I turned off broadcasting in the UniFi controller, they would all disconnect. I tried a chat session with Nest support but all they were able to say was the newer Nest cams should work with hidden SSIDs. Oh well.

Since I’ve already run the ethernet cable through the attic, I might just bite the bullet and replace the UAP with a second UAP-AC-LR. But for now I’ve got a pretty decent wireless infrastructure setup at home.