UBIQUITI ER-6P EdgeRouter 6P

Win10 Pro clients and the network printer are NOT visible to each other in Windows networking. Cisco routers have no such problems. Run away from the ER-6P as if the building were on fire. I gave one star because zero is not an option.

I'm a network engineer who owns and operates hundreds of Ubiquiti products across five states. I have almost every model of their EdgeRouter and EdgeSwitch products along with a dozen wireless access points and Unifi switches and controllers sitting here next to me right now. I'm tired of the shoddy software, the lack of support, and the toxicity and abuse from this company. Where do I even start? Ubiquiti is big on marketing, hype, and social media, but sad on support, updates, fixes, and improvements. Marketing of Ubiquiti products is often intentionally vague, and it can be difficult to figure out exactly what features are supported and what is being improperly implied. There's a huge number of undocumented hardware and software limitations, such as the ERX having a maximum routing throughput of 500Mbps, the ER12 being limited to 700Mbps in certain bridging and VLAN configurations, the ERPOE5's ports 3-5 performance issues because of it's switch, the ERPOE5 not having a VLAN aware switch, some devices are constantly running out of storage space (ERX), the ER-Lite's failing USB drives, and on and on and on and on and on. I've long suspected that Ubiquiti uses paid shills to post pictures of their products on twitter, facebook, and reddit. Some of their resellers are also strangely involved with the different communities and forums. Don't fall for the hype. Ubiquiti PoE usually isn't 802.3 standard. Some products are 802.3af/at/bt, some are passive 24V, some are passive 48V, some are passive 12V. Which product supports what? Who knows. Their marketing docs won't tell you. The community has raged about this many times so they finally made a FAQ article about it, but it's out of date and hasn't been updated in years, so some products are missing. Countless numbers of devices have been destroyed by plugging the wrong wireless access point into the wrong switch or power injector. There are significant disparities between what can be configured through the command line and what can be configured through the Web GUI. For example, OpenVPN has no GUI support at all, but is a highly used and advertised feature. Routing protocols are also very difficult or impossible to configure from the GUI. Troubleshooting from the GUI is almost impossible because there's no way to get many logs or output from status commands and counters. There are a significant number of configuration commands which are simply broken, resulting in errors such as "The specified configuration node is not valid" or "Set failed". Copy pasting to/from the serial console is not safe or reliable. Sometimes random characters will get lost and the configuration will get corrupted. Holding down the space bar while doing a "show configuration commands" will often result in garbage output. Early EdgeSwitch models didn't even come with a serial console port. Bonkers. Security issues abound. For example previous EdgeSwitch OS versions had hidden SNMP "public" writable community. It was over a year before they fixed it, and only when some news stories picked it up. Lots of unpatched security issues, privilege escalation exploits, and design problems. The official forum is toxic. Some time in 2018/2019 they replaced it and now it's even worse. Questions and comments are regularly censored and deleted. Most questions and bug reports go unanswered. The forum is where hope goes to die. Most models have no bootloader recovery method, and the "factory restore" procedure leaves custom files and confirmation on the device. A "factory reset" doesn't do a "factory reset". Committing configuration changes often takes 20-30 seconds, even on high-end models. Using punctuation when naming Port or Address Groups can cause serious bugs. EdgeRouter DDNS doesn't actually work. 48-port EdgeSwitch Lites failing en-mass. 48-port EdgeSwitches blowing power resistors and having other serious electrical problems. Unifi AC AP Lite being fried/burned while plugged into EdgeSwitches. The ER-Lite has a longstanding well-known unfixed problems with UDP packets being dropped/re-ordered/corrupted. Policy routing doesn't work, documentation abandoned. The vbash shell job control is broken. You can background a process with "&", but "jobs", "fg", and other job control commands are missing. I've had issues where disabling VLAN interfaces did not actually disable the interface and it was still running. Doing a "clear ip ospf process" doesn't actually restart the process. If a new interface is created, such as an IPSec VTI or ethernet VLAN/vif interface, OSPF will not begin advertising the new network, even if it has a network declaration statement. You can't create a firewall rule with multiple source and destination ports. There no 802.11ad/LACP support. The list of issues bugs and unfinished or non-existent features just goes on and on and on. Do yourself a favor and just buy something else.

Excellent product, working as expected, greatly improving my network.

Not sure about the older reviews and interface / software issue. Worked great right out of the box with a great browser interface full featured and lots of use data. Setup direct from the browser interface without even using the Ubiquiti controller software. Use the setup wizard as another reviewer noted, then customize when finished. PoE 2 and 4 pair, all 5 ports can have software enabled as a switch, dual wan with traffic balancing and fall over, and fanless. What more can you expect for this price? This router is pro gear and features at a consumer gear price. Paired with Ubiquiti mesh AP’s, it’s an amazing value to blaze gigE across a building with no other gear needed. One note: it is a software bridge switch and not a chipset, so you sacrifice a tiny bit of speed. Only the edge X has a chipset switch. Also, the wizard initially sets the bridge on the eth1 & 2 only, so you have to config eth 3-5 to bridge on your own. If the terminology in my review is unfamiliar to you, then please stick with consumer gear at big box stores as you will only find frustration with Ubiquiti products. They expect a min level of network topology knowledge.

I bought my EdgeRouter 6P as an upgrade from an EdgeRouter POE, and so that I can have two working routers and do not have to be offline while upgrading the firmware. I previously tried an EdgeRouter X for this purpose and found it to be useless because the ER-X has so little storage. Just enable logging, and the ER-X hit disk-full and stop working in two weeks. The ER-6P is another story. It has 4GB of flash storage to the ER-POE's 2GB, 1GB of RAM to the ER-POE's 512MB, and four 1GHz MIPS64 cores to the POE's two 600MHz cores. It is a MUCH more powerful router for not very much more money. It arrived back-rev'd on the firmware, but it is a matter of a couple of commands to reflash it to the latest version. Also unlike the ER-POE, the EdgeRouter 6P has an optional rack-mount kit available (that will fit anything from an ER-4 to an ER-12). Some users complain about the administration GUI. I find it OK, but I don't use it for most configuration tasks, just for traffic monitoring, preferring to ssh login to the router and use the command-line. I also don't use the supplied firewall functionality, preferring to use Shorewall instead, which I find both much more powerful and much easier to configure. (The rule-chains interface used by netfilter is cryptic and pointlessly arcane.) My ER-POE is now a spare; I will use it to test out new firmware releases and while updating the 6P. If you have an older EdgeRouter and want to get more performance, this latest generation of routers is a good upgrade. If you're just getting started, they provide much better performance than anything Netgear or D-Link will sell you — but you DO need to at least somewhat know what you're doing. You will still need a cable or DSL modem; these routers will not do that for you. If you want to have WiFi, the EdgeRouter won't do that either; consider trying one of Ubiquiti's Unifi wireless access points instead. A Unifi WAP will give you much better wireless coverage than almost any wireless router appliance on the market, for less money, and you can add additional WAPs if you need more coverage much more easily than you can add additional consumer wireless routers.