Unifi two years on ....

For personal reasons I changed my Unifi account at TMHQ and instead of a simple account transfer, it involved the whole shebang of having installers come to the house and setup everything all over again! At least this time they were in and out in 20 minutes because I said I will handle the configuration myself.

What has changed? Seems TM has new hardware revisions (still same manufacturers though) to all their components - their BTU, gateway (modem/router) and STB are now all matching and stackable but are still made by Fiberhome, D-Link and Huawei respectively. The stackability of the hardware does lend itself to looking very neat and tidy as opposed to their previous generation hardware which was the orange-white-grey combo of different sizes.

The gateway (or modem/router/whatever) is labeled WBR-2300 and is a D-Link OEM based on the same DIR-615 series but only in a different shell. The missing manual to the gateway can be downloaded from the D-link Taiwan support site. Antennas are built-in and a rated at 5dBi so will mostly work in terrace homes but triple-storey and large bungalows may experience service degradation ... YMMV. I personally had no problems but did notice a drop in connection dBm using inSSIDer - in use the speeds remain the same as before. I set my gateway to use the 80211BGN at 100% transmission power and 40MHz spectrum (i.e. 300Mbps mode for 11N) and WMM power save enabled and haven't suffered any problems thus far .... especially when I have heterogeneous devices ranging from desktop PCs, laptops, iPads, iPhones, smartTVs, DLNA servers and media players.

The default setup STILL enables remote configuration by TM and should be removed ASAP - the hidden account here is using the case sensitive "operator:h566UniFi" combo to enter operator mode. Once in operator mode, proceed to Setup>>WAN and click the edit icon in the action column and uncheck "Enable WAN". Leave all other settings in the Setup tab alone and navigate to Advanced>>Access Control>>Remote Access Control. Uncheck enable for all options and repeat for the IPv6 version. Lastly, navigate to Management>>TR069 Configuration and uncheck "Enable Interval Inform". Additionally, you should add a password to the admin account (which by default is not passworded).

The only other major change is the STB which is now running a stripped down version of Android - previous versions were running a customized linux operating system. The STB has better processing power and interface navigation is markedly improved and more responsive. Additionally, the STB now sports dual USB ports and can playback media files ... or possibly allow sideloading of apks to install new apps. Will investigate this soon .....

..... Show/hide full post