 I've been excited to do this for a little while. Folks at Unify, a few months back, sent us a beta demo where it's supposed to keep our lips sealed about it. Well, now it's out, unit of this. Now, we currently have the production unit, and that's what the review is on, but the beta unit pretty much looks the same. They have little stickers on it, but you know it's a beta unit, and it's performed amazing. So we've actually been actively testing this unit for quite a while. And now it's here, it's released, and we've been playing around with the production unit for a little while and waiting to do the review. So I don't want to do a review of like, hey, look how it looks in the box. I want to talk about how has it held up? Has it had any issues? No, it's got all the firmware updates and all that's gone fine. No issues to report it off for it. Unfortunately, I can't test one of the cool features, which is the fact that theoretically, it can support up to 1,500 users per device, which is pretty outstanding. I mean, 1,500 users, of course, theoretical maximum, you may not have that many users at once on there. It'll be a little bit less as far as what your actual practical uses are, but theoretically 1,500 on here. And the reason for this device, and this is a very high density commercial Wi-Fi, is if you're doing a build, let's say a sports stadium, and you have a lot of people there. Well, infrastructure is an expensive part when you're installing all these. The idea and concept between this and other devices is this supports more density per device. So if you have fewer devices, you lower the cost to deploy infrastructure because of all the cabling and wiring. And this thing is a beast. So we're gonna get into the details here in a second, but here it is, almost dropped. It's not light. It's meant to be bolted down and mounted. Almost pulled the Linus there, dropping things. It's just a amazingly well-made solid, like this is made to be outdoors, hold up to the weather, the elements. And kind of a cool thing here, and we'll get into the details, is it does have a hook that I should be holding all the time so I don't drop it. The idea is if you're climbing up to mount this somewhere, you would lanyard through this because you want there. The other thing you may have noticed is RGBs because if you're gonna have a high-performance Wi-Fi device, then why shouldn't you have color-selectable RGBs? And we'll show that in the software. That's actually pretty slick. So yes, it does the unified blue, but it also does purple. And it doesn't do my company orange very good. I tried matching it to the LEDs back here. It's hard to get the orange on there. So we'll ding them on that little note so they can put better RGBs because that's what matters when you're buying high-density enterprise Wi-Fi equipment. Okay, it does to me a little bit for reviewing. But we're gonna get this unboxed, which I've actually already done in this video is being shot after the unboxing. So things were done in reverse because magic and non-linear editing of things. But this is a 10 gig connected beast and let's just get this box opened up and dig into it, man, this thing is cool. Now, we've actually already adopted this and so it's been out of the box once already. So don't mind any of the things that are little marks on the plastic. That's from us. We didn't peel the plastic off. I waited for the video to do that. So let's peel the plastic off right now. It does come well protected. And now it's not protected. Look at that. Now, one of the things about the service of this and that you could probably do when we've talked about putting some stickers on it. Now that we have two of these, we might sticker up the demo one because it would never be used in production, but it's kind of fun to play with. So let's start with what's in the box here. So this was this and this plastic here, I don't know, it feels metal. So like a metal backing to it, but of course, plastics of the Wi-Fi can go through the front. But this thing is quite, quite heavy. And when we look at the mounting on the back of it here, it has this nice hook to help pick it up. And it does have quite a bit of weight to it. It's really solid. I also like that they have these with the little keepers on them. So if you pull this out, the little pieces of plastic will keep the screws from falling out. Cause ideally you're going to be mounting this somewhere, maybe up high, especially if in the stadium. And these bolts here to keep them from backing out too far also have little stoppers on them. So you can only back them out so far. And when you get into the brackets, you'll see how that matters. So let's get this on the way. So talk about what else is in the box. Have the Unify Quick Start Guide for the base station XG. We have the power POE injector here. Pretty solid. So right there, we'll just set that aside here. We'll talk about that in a second though. Your power adapter. These are for the whole mounting bolts that you have here. So nice solid set of screws, nice well packaged. All separate. And just jumble in the bag. They're kind of the individual kind of blister pack. The bracket that holds the back of it. So you have this, you have a level in it. And it can be pole mounted for different poles that go this way or that way. So you can kind of see the way the ridge is on there to really grip whatever you're mounting it to. Other side of the bracket. So this is the other piece where the bolts will go through. You can get one starter bolt and then swing this around and put the other bolts in. Nice design. And that's it for the box. It's nice because it's well protected and it's pretty heavy. So flipping this box over and anything like that it's not going to damage it because it's got plenty of padding on each side of the box. So once again for Unify making it solid piece of packaging here. So unscrew these bottoms here and pull this out. So it's got these rubber stoppers and you pull this out too. This is where you'd run the network cable through or I believe they split. Yeah, they're split. So you can pull this little plastic off and then run the network cable through and push it all back together. It's like a little plastic cage on here. I'm not going to break it. You kind of get the idea. And the reason they have a plug in it, whoops, that's on the floor. The reason they have the plug in it is you only need to connect one side of this. Now I did test this. Well sealed here, no water's getting in. Not to mention this would be facing down so not likely hit a water getting in but they're good well sealed when you tighten them up. But when you drop the network cable in here you can power it on both the 10 gig or one gig side. So this does have the option to connect to both. Ideally due to the saturation and number of PPLI have connected you're going to want to connect this to 10 gig. Let's pull the little sticky off here. We're going to plug this in in a second and show you what that is. This is a display that gives you some information about what's going on there. And this display allows for showing you the IP address. And I believe it shows number of users. We'll turn it on in a second and take a look at that. The display in the bottom is pretty neat. All right, now for the mounting bracket here I just pulled these two bolts out. These are the little plastic holders that we're holding them together. It's just so you don't drop them bolts. So hopefully you're not doing this all up there. This is probably something you do before you start your climb up to wherever you're going to mount this. It goes like this and voila. We just screw these in. And these have Phillips heads on them too. So it's easy to use a screwdriver and then you can ratchet them down. I don't have a ratchet handy for this. We'll just thumb tighten them in and we do that. And you tighten them up a little bit. So the bracket has, you can mount it this way so you could do a facing down like this. So you mount it and then you could have it down firing. Let's say you mounted it in a ceiling at a large venue. Then also, this is kind of neat for demonstration here. It will stand up when you have it like this. It's a little unbalanced. It'll tip over forward. One of the improper ways that you can actually do this is you can spin the base around this bracket around and we did that when doing the demo because we didn't want to mount it on anything. So kind of an awful way, but also has plenty of holes in the back. So you could bolt holes through here to bolt this to a wall and then adjust the angle of the device from there. So if you don't want to use the other piece of the bracket, that's another way to mount it. And this is what the other bracket looks like when you want to put that on top. If you do want to use that bracket, once again, it comes with all the bolts needed to do this. So that's enough about the physical part of the device. Let's actually plug this in and get started with it. Now coming back to the PoE brick, the one thing I wanted to cover real quick was the PoE brick is labeled as a gigabit PoE brick, but you're probably saying, hey, that says 10 gig. We tested it and there was no problems. It connects fine at 10 gig through this brick. I'm sure it's just because the labeling says gigabit, it does do 10 gig through the power injector. That wasn't an issue at all. Just wanted to cover that in case anyone's wondering. And like I said, we powered on either side of the 10 gig or the one gig depending on the connection that you have for this. Now something to note here, I'm gonna go ahead and take this piece out. You obviously want to put it through here and through. We're just using a pre-booted cable, so we're not going to. But I like that these come out. It makes it easier. Now it's not super easy, but if you put these in, you can try not to drop this and tighten these up a little more. You can simply push on the bottom of the boot and pop it back out to get to it, even with my fingers. Ideally, you can use a screwdriver. And even if you drop them into the hole like this, you can simply slip a flathead screwdriver and lever it just a little bit to push the tab down. So not a big deal if you do put it in with this in there and want to get it back out. But that's just something if you do it like this, make sure you have a thin flathead screwdriver or something small you can get in there if you want to pop it back out. And like any other unified device, it blinks out the status of booting. We've already adopted this, so it then turns the color that we adopted to. And I said the color we adopted it to. So you're used to a lot of the unified devices, you know, blue, green for some of the older ones. This offers RGB color changing, and we'll talk about that, because that's just a neat feature that is also available on here. And now we're seeing the display. It's got the little slash to it, because it's not yet talking to the server. It's thinking. All right, now that it's connected, you can see a little closer here. Zero client's connected and it gives me the IP address that this got assigned. So pretty simple. And here's a closer look to it, that 10 gig port. And something I noticed is there's like a blue light inside the hole on this one. That's kind of cool. I can't see where else it comes through, because this is set to red, but there appears to be some blue LED behind there. Okay, now we've looked at all the physical stuff. Let's talk about what makes this thing huge. So the base station XG has a quad radio 802.11 AC wave two, access point with dedicated security and beamforming antenna. A lot of mouthful. And let's get into a little bit of the details on there, because one of the security things it has is that we refer to as a security radio with persistent threat management. What this is, is so there's four radios, three dedicated to providing Wi-Fi, and a fourth to monitoring Wi-Fi. And this is kind of a neat feature and it's other enterprise devices that have had these as well. It's pretty cool because it can monitor the environment without taking down the rest of the environment. It does have really, as they say, flexible WLAN groups. We'll talk about that too. And all the other features are talking about a lot of has to do with the software because of course it works with the software from UniFi as all the other ones so it integrates perfectly fine with the rest of your UniFi devices. Let's go down a little bit further though and talk about this. So indoor and outdoor, five gigahertz tri-van, five gigahertz radio rate of 1733, five gigahertz MIMO four by four, dedicated security radio, secondary ethernet port, wall mount, wireless uplink, airtime, air view, and WPS. Now, this is also really cool. RF energy steering. This is an option. And if you can see this kind of exploded view here of how the radios are, the radios are laid out in arrays and the beam forming comes because you can choose the bandwidth of the beam, wide or narrow, so 15 or 90 degree angles. And then we have some of the other specs on here and showing like a stadium application example, putting them around the stadium like I had mentioned. And here is the weight without the mount. 3.2 go grams or seven pounds. Like I said, it's fairly heavy. RGB software controllable. I'm gonna show that in a second. Power supply, the 1.2 a gigabit PoE. It says gigabit, but don't worry, it works fine at 10 gigabit. Beam forming and a max power consumption of only 31 watts. And that actually surprised me. This thing is not super high wattage for the amount of power. When you think of just how many people that you can service with that, that's impressive on there. So concurrent clients, 1500 as a max theoretical, I've seen for load balancing and Wi-Fi distribution, don't just go, hey, it supports 1500 and calculate off that, always leave yourself a lot of overhead room on there so you have better higher quality Wi-Fi. All right, so let's take a look at the software and of course I'll leave you a link to all this. You can dig into every little detail in case or something I didn't read off of here, but this is all public information right on the Unify website. This is the beta one, which is currently unplugged. This is air rectangle, the production one functionally. Like I said, we were under-indicated when we were testing it. Functionally, it seems to work all the same. I don't know, maybe there's maybe some internal differences, but functionally, they seem to be exactly the same as the beta, which we tested for months. We've only tested this one. I think we've had it several, couple weeks of testing and it's, like I said, gone fine. We'll go over here and pop this out and we go right here to config. So the first thing you're gonna see is this is how I made it purple and this is how you make it red and we're gonna hit save and it pushes the changes. Takes about 30 seconds, maybe less, to provision the color change. So it happens pretty fast and that's just kind of neat that you can use those or you can just choose on or off and you could be boring with it if you wanted to. It does offer brightness control and I like that you can just dial it in for as an hex color. So you can get precise on there if you have a specific color but like I said, it did have a little trouble producing some of the orange and yeah, that's life. Radios, here's where you can control and this is what's kind of neat. So having multiple radios, we can set the first radio to like a channel width of 20, 40, 80, 160. We can set another radio to, or this way to a wide angle and then another radio to maybe a 20 and then another radio down here. So we can set each one to its own channel width and each one as a narrow or wide angle antenna. So it's got some options. That way you can customize the beam forming to the scenario that works for you. So without changing out the device, you get wide angle and beam angle. Now the thing that we're really interested in, maybe we'll try to do some more subjective testing later against some other devices but even with these wide angles and we've tried them with the narrow angles, it has incredible penetration to our building at five gigahertz. It just seems to really push through a lot of stuff better than five gigahertz normally does. So that was kind of impressive with it from our use standpoint. And to give you an idea, the five gigahertz prior with like the HDs wasn't connecting in my car when I was in the parking lot. When I get in the parking lot in the mornings and I pull up here, my phone almost instantly connects to the five gigahertz network that is provided. And we have this at the very back of our building. So we'll do some tests later to try to determine some of the range on this device versus some of the other ones that'll be a separate test. But performance-wise and range-wise, it does seem quite impressive. Now here's where you have the WLAN groups because in addition to controlling your radios narrow and wide, you can also individually assign if you wanted to. And you can do this with the other unifies that have multiple antennas in them but you can assign them to different WLAN groups or in this case, we have three different Wi-Fis attached to our network on different VLANs. And you could say only the narrow antenna which would be like the first one and only these Wi-Fis. So it gives you some customization there if you wanted to override the settings. The nice thing is out of the box for configuring, you adopt it, the default settings other than choosing whether you want narrow or wide. The default settings work great and it pushes all the different Wi-Fi to all the different radios. But it's nice to have that customization. So here's your management VLAN whereby default is at LAN but you can create a separate management VLAN if you didn't want it to be part of your main network, network settings, wireless uplink, allow meshing to another access point, manually configure uplink providers. So that is still an option on here where you can do that. And of course, the other usual for provisioning, custom provisioning, copy a configuration from another device. RF environment, it does have an RF environment separate scan that you can do here. This is done where it takes it offline to do it. So you get the warning when you do this, right, cancel. Then we have airtime, which I'm gonna start. This is kind of neat because without stopping anything on here, we can look at the airtime channels that's on utilization, stations, noise level. And this will in real-time show over a timeline the data going across there. So this is kind of neat. You can sort it by packets, MAC address, which one's on there, unknown broadcast ID that I guess is probably interfering with it. Probably picking up something from the neighbors. You can break it on a data. So this is kind of a neat way to look at this. QOS data packets, the MAC address. So kind of novel there. And of course, then it has air view. I'm gonna start the air view on this and pop it out. Also, both of these offer being popped out like this. And once again, I'm doing this without shutting it down. This will give me a cumulative or a waterfall so you can look for wifi interference. Now I thought it was kind of cool is it can see in the 2.4, the 2G and 5G ranges. Yeah, 2.4 ranges on there. Even though it's not a 2.4, at least you can see what's in that range. And then you can run this concurrently while it's still providing wifi and still being hooked up and that. And then we have the stats page and you can see what it's doing here. And you can look at each one individually for utilization based on which antennas are being connected. Once again, it's allowing you some stats to give you some informed decisions on it. So last thing I wanna cover is the debug terminal. So this allows you to SSH into the busy box kernel that's in pretty much all your unified devices like your switches or your wifi access points. So you actually get terminal commands right inside there within the Linux busy box so you can troubleshoot, ping things and stuff like that. But let's take a closer look at it. I just wanna exit out of this one because it's hard to read. I like that they've built this in. All right, connection dropped there. And we'll SSH into it. And first thing I wanna show you is when you run like an IF config and look at all of them it's kind of neat looking at the internals. These are all the devices that are inside there. So 808H1, 23456. So even though we only see a couple of WLAN groups get looking behind the scenes of this is kind of neat because you can see there's so many more pieces to this of the way they handle the networking in the backend on here. And to build out all of this is software defined networking, including, you can see like here's the VLAN.69 we have in there. Here's the VLAN.50. So it's kind of nice. And I like that you can get into there because from then this device I can do things like ping other devices and see it. It's just, you know, nice having some of these tools TraceShot, I believe TraceShot's built in as well. Yep, TracePath. And then we can trace path to, and what we're able to do from here is see how the Unify from that device is getting out to the network. Like I said, this is something that, it's a general Unify thing, but I like that it's built in. But I also like that it's your ability to see all the different Wi-Fi devices and get a better understanding if there's something more you wanted to do with it is there, that's pretty cool. And of course the last thing I'll show you is when we look at it from the 16 port. What was this? This is that the air rectangle where it's plugged in. And as you can see, it is connected at 10 gigs. So that's through that POE injector that says gigabit. This is like I said, that's a question that's come up before is will it do 10 gigabit through that? Yeah, it seems to work perfectly fine. We don't have any problems. Of course, if you have a PoE switch you can do it that way too. But of course the PoE switch then would have to be 10 gig and it's a whole different animal getting it all set up. So you'd probably use the power injector and the scenario like this where we're connecting it to the RJ45s of this. Okay, hopefully this was helpful. And I guess we're really happy with the device. It works great. We haven't had any problems with it. It's been great to work with and we look forward to new products from Unify. And we look forward to deploying these in scenarios. We have a couple of bids out there and hopefully we win them. And we'll be deploying these in some even larger high density environments. So like to see the performance of them. It's impressive. All right, thanks. Links below to the details of the product on Unify's page. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video go ahead and click the thumbs up. Leave us some feedback below to let us know any details which you like and didn't like as well because we love hearing feedback or if you just wanna say thanks, leave a comment. If you wanted to be notified of new videos as they come out, go ahead and hit the subscribe and the bell icon that lets YouTube know that you're interested in notifications. Hopefully they send them as we've learned with YouTube. 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