 Tommy here from Learn Systems and should you trust your network with ubiquity or should you trust yourself to install ubiquity? And that's probably a bigger question. As far as the brand itself in terms of being able to install it and does it do with claims, does it do with the marketing people say, which is provide wireless access or provide switching or provide routing? Yes, yes, and yes. We've actually installed quite a few of these devices, actually looked it up just for 2022 on the projects internally that we worked on as in we deployed them directly for clients. We spent over $200,000 just on access points and switches. And we have had extremely low failure rate. They work wonderful. I wouldn't say the failure rates any higher than any other product we've used. I've had people complain saying there's high failure rates, but that doesn't really seem to hold up. And I don't really know the authority of the people commenting because they're often anonymous random usernames on YouTube, occasionally some random usernames on other social platforms that seem to really just want to dump on a product and tell me that's garbage, get their caps lock ready and don't give me any other context to have me understand why they think it's garbage. Now, my experience besides buying the hardware also comes from consulting on it. And that's a pretty broad term, I know, but let's break down the stats of just how much consulting we do on Unify. Now we use a service called You Can Book Me. It is a service that we have plugged into our booking process. So when we send people a link, they can fill out a form and put their credit card in and easily buy basic consulting hours from us. Not 100% of our consulting is done this way. Sometimes people buy block hours, but this will establish kind of a perspective for how many bookings just came through this particular form. So this is between 1 1 2022 and 11 29 2022 today. So these are bookings done this year, it sends it to an email address. And we've already downloaded that file. So then we're going to go grip CI booked. And what that is is count and ignore case for number of books in this particular file, which gives us 544 so far this year. And then we're going to filter this for the word Unify. Because people fill out a description of what they want to consulting on. And there's a 126 of them. And if you're curious, how many people capitalize Unify like I was, I was like, well, let's go ahead and how many have a capital Unify and maybe how many capitalize the f in Unified. Oh, okay. So it gives you some other numbers and maybe how many people just do it lowercase. Why not while we're here? All right, 19 of them. And all those other businesses we've consulted with many of them are internal IT teams or sometimes individual IT companies or IT business owners who need a little help building out and establishing their network. That is just something we offer something we do. So yes, I know that's a little self-serving thing that we offer as a service. But I want to establish after all these bookings, even, you know, me consulting with all the technicians, I'm not the one doing it. I have an entire team of doing it. And I always ask my technicians, what was the problem? Would you find what was, you know, the issue? Was it an unsolvable buggy Unify software? Or was it just misconfiguration? And 99% of times the problems we run into are misconfiguration, all kinds of things like people using mixed environments being one of the more common things we get consulting for because they only want to replace a segment of their environment, not all of it at once. And that makes sense. Now, in terms of scale, not just quantity, but the scale that we've installed that we have plenty of sites that we've done, they have well over 300 access points and 100 switches at that location, distributing a series of separate networks, sometimes guests, sometimes internal or secure networks across there. So it's not just home users or anything like that. When it comes to the bookings, it's quite a few large scale projects. And that being said, once again, we wouldn't recommend or be deploying these if they didn't work. And I'm not here to change your mind if you already came in here hating ubiquity and just wanted to come in, leave some comments on how I'm just some type of paid shill for ubiquity that seems to come up a lot. But I have no business affiliation with them with the exception of the affiliate link I had. And I say had because briefly me and several other people on YouTube like crosstalk solutions, we all had affiliate links from ubiquity, which we were happy to say, Hey, click our affiliate link, and we'll get a commission. But that was a short lived idea that ubiquity had. And hey, cool, while it lasted, I'll take the free clicks. But well, there's no more affiliate links. So if you want to buy ubiquity or you decide to buy it, I got no offer code for you just head over to the website. And that's it. In terms of me sharing this knowledge, other than doing consulting, something that my company offers, there's not really any reason for me to tell you other than just to be honest and just to be truthful about the product. I don't have anything else to gain. Well, maybe a few more consulting calls for people that want to learn about it. But I also have a lot of videos that, well, people can watch and there's not just me, many people create a lot of ubiquity videos to talk about the product, how it works. And it's been a good way ubiquities done their marketing by just kind of sending products to people. Now, in the past, distant past, they did send me products. But I think I've ranted a few too many times about my dislike of their firewalls, because, well, they just quit sending me things. And I've always disclosed upfront when something was sent to me, just so you can understand that it was sent to me, but it's never, you know, changed my review. Hence the reason that when they sent me a firewall, I ranted about the problems I had with it. But I think that's why they don't send me anything more. So I just been buying everything myself every time I want one of the ubiquity products to review, to test, or to do some teaching on. But my goal today was just to kind of establish that, yes, it's still a trusted brand to me. I haven't really found any alternatives that made me go, wow, that is a great solution. I have been reviewing and testing some of the new Cisco stuff. And once again, I think someone at Cisco heard the F word, free word. And Cisco, what I thought was going to become out with a system that allowed you to host the controller like ubiquity does, but there's still licensing attached to it. Once you have over, I think it's 25 devices, I'll have to look it up because reviews coming on now. And then the other companies have found ways to have licensing fees or not allow you to self host the controller. They put it all in their cloud, which even if they're not charging for it today, this goes with many of the companies, the cloud's never free. If you have to host and pay for the infrastructure, there comes a point when someone goes, hey, we have enough people that we can probably just start charging for it. This is one of the reasons ubiquity has established this self hostable controller, and it's done so well. They really, and there's not much competition in the market for that. I think it's one of those other companies just can't get with it. They're just hoping ubiquity will fail. They'll hope in that this idea that ubiquity has had that's been running for a number of years and they're a publicly traded company with fast growth, that it will just fail and it won't work. And people will eventually have to go to the paid model again. And that's just the way the old companies have always established that you pay for these controllers, you license it, and you don't get to own any of your products, you just have to keep paying licensing fees forever. Ubiquity is kind of still standing alone in the market as far as an established competitor that will work without the licensing fees. People always ask me, what's the alternative? And I'm like, I don't know, I would love it. I would love more competition in the market, but I'm not sure which company is going to really step up to plate to actually do it right. I haven't seen it yet. And yes, I've tested plenty of other products. Feel free to leave other suggestions down below. And yes, I've tested trend net ones as well, which I was not real impressed with security. Now, my final thoughts on ubiquity being the solution for everything. And that's certainly not the case. If you have a network design that requires switches that have routing capabilities, then don't choose ubiquity. Yes, I know there's boxes that say, into marketing, people say, yes, it does layer through routing on the switch. And I wouldn't recommend using it. Same thing with their firewalls. I'm not a big fan of them. We use PF sense instead. That's kind of my go to firewall. We've actually found with the exception of the sonic wall DHCP problem, which if you Google that, you can find some problems where DHCP leases wouldn't go through the APs. I don't remember why I think there was a series of firmware changes that you had to do to fix that and find the right version of the right firmware to make that work. But for the most part, most other firewalls that we run into, which is actually a lot of 40 nets as well, don't seem to have any problem with the ubiquity. Our preference is PF sense, but you know, it's not the only one it will work with. Now, the last thing I'll comment on with all the hardware we bought and all the consulting we did, what about failure rates? How many times have you found these to fail in terms of specifically access point and switches? And as under a percent, we just don't have that many return. We've had more switches than access points fail. I just think that's kind of be the nature of things because it's almost always when a switch fails. It's usually a PoE switch. Sometimes it's in a room that may have been a little bit hot and that's probably a contributing factor on there. And PoE switches the earlier ones, especially if you had one of the old 16 port ones, yeah, those ones would definitely run a little hot. The eight port ones would run a little hot too. But they've always surprised me of not failing. I don't recall any ones that we've installed of the eight port variety, which is I believe an older discontinued version. Those were hot switches that, well, shockingly have held up over the years. We even have one in my office that's been running number of years now without any problems at all. And it's running several cameras on it. It actually runs our unified camera center office. We've just been kind of curious how long it will last. And so far, I'm impressed. It's working very well. But the Gen2 switches with better airflow, I think they've kind of mitigated that in case you're in a overly hot room. But I will quit ranting on this, leave your comments and concerns down below as I'm always curious what people's sales objections are for it. And as I said, I'm just trying to serve as a data point. I'm not here to tell you this is the product. I'm not a spokesperson or a sales person for the product, but it is a product we implement a lot. So I wanted to share my knowledge and experience on that product right here on my channel. And as always, for a more in depth discussion on this, because YouTube comments can only, there can be a little bit finicky, head over to my forums for a more in depth discussion. And there I'll have a more engaging conversation. Maybe there's some trouble or misconceptions you had about how the system works. And I'm more than happy to answer those questions for you or head over to the ubiquity forums. Other community forums are actually pretty helpful. There's a lot of good people in there. There's also been a lot of help over on Reddit. There's a, you know, ubiquity subreddit that well has a lot of engagement as well. So I think there's a lot of community information you can get on there. Thanks for watching and take care. And thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video. If you've enjoyed the content, please give us a thumbs up. If you would like to see more content from this channel, hit the subscribe button and the bell icon. If you like to hire a short project, head over to LawrenceSystems.com and click the hires button right at the top. To help this channel out in other ways, there's a join button here for YouTube and a Patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated. 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