Ubiquiti UniFi 6 Long-Range Access Point U6-LR

Product Information

At the top, there’s the LED ring which will be solid blue if everything is fine and the device is adopted to the UniFi. Otherwise, the LED will stay solid white waiting for the AP to be adopted. It’s also going to flash white when the Ubiquiti U6-LR is initializing and booting up, and, if it has lost connection to the network, searching for the wireless uplink, the LED will flash blue every 5 seconds. Not really a fan of the single LED system, as I said many times, but I admit it looks very cool on the Ubiquiti access points, so it gets a pass in this case. Single 1Gbps port.

Doubling your channel width increases the noise floor by 3 dB, reducing SNR and your range by around 30% each time. Currently have a AC-Pro in my living room and it had issues with coverage in my garage so I added a AC-M near the garage. I was considering the 6 LR as an upgrade and was wondering if the 6 LR could eliminate the AC-M.For the switch, you could go for the USW-Lite-8-PoE and the EdgeRouter should be a good option. If you have the space and budget, then the Dream Machine Pro SE is the best option (replaces your router and switch) The U6-Lite doesn’t support 160 MHz channels with the two firmware versions I tried. The other models do, so I tested them for comparison. I wouldn’t recommend using 160 MHz in a typical 5 GHz network. There’s only 2 effective 160 MHz channels in 5 GHz, and they both intersect with DFS. Also, using 160 MHz channels reduce their 4 spatial streams down to two. That said, I did manage to nearly match gigabit Ethernet speeds in my controlled scenario. In this extreme situation, a single gigabit uplink became a limiting factor. This is especially true for the U6-LR. I need to explain a little bit how I tested the speed of the access points. Measuring the speed of a wireless network connection really depends on many factors. Transmit power settings, the distance between an access point and client, wireless network congestion (if you live in an urban environment, then the 2.4 GHz channels are probably crowded), the wireless adapter of the client device, etc.

The size of the U6 LR on the other hand is increased a lot compared to the old model. It’s the same size as the old Unifi HD access point. The new long-range access point is splash and dust resistant (IP54 rated), which means you can place it semi-outdoors under a porch for example. TheUniFiU6-LR delivers an aggregate radio rate of up to 3.0 Gbps with 5 GHz (4x4 MU-MIMO and OFDMA) and 2.4 GHz 4x4 MIMO radios. The U6-LR seamlessly blends into any environment, and is capable of being mounted in indoor and semi-outdoor environments (IP54 rated).

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For users wanting an affordable Wi-Fi 6 Access Point, the new UniFi 6 Lite offers excellent value for money with only a small price premium over Ubiquiti UniFi Lite Wi-Fi 5 product, as shown in Table 1, below. Both devices do not support 160 MHz channels but this is not a major issue, as discussed in our recent article What Realistic Speeds Will I Get With Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6? If you are deploying multiple Access Points (and, if not, you really should be for maximum performance), there simply is not enough 5 GHz spectrum available to support 160 MHz channel bandwidths, and most client devices do not support 160 MHz channel bandwidths anyway. For comparisons of all UniFi AP models, see my UniFi Comparison Charts and UniFi Access Point Buyers Guide.

While you may see a data rate of 1200 Mbps, you won’t ever get 1200 Mbps of throughput. There is a lot of overhead in Wi-Fi. Actual TCP throughput is usually 60-70% of your data rate. There are many reasons for this: Netgear WAX630 review: Astounding performance for dense networks Best Wi-Fi routers and access points 2023: Get the strongest signal and top performance DrayTek VigorAP 1060C review: Pedal to the metal While we discuss the measured throughput performance later in this review, it is important to point out that the maximum radio link speeds given in the tables above will translate to significantly lower actual throughputs, as explained in our article What Realistic Speeds Will I Get With Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6? Also, given that the UniFi 6 LR Access Point is connected to a network using Gigabit Ethernet then the maximum throughput achievable from the UniFi 6 LR is obviously the maximum throughput achievable through Gigabit Ethernet, which is about 940 Mbps, as described in our article What is a Good Signal Level or Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) for Wi-Fi?Good the know is that WiFi 6 is only supported on the 5GHz band on both models. We see this also with other manufactures, that they only upgrade the 5GHz band and not the 2.4GHz band to WiFi 6. That doesn’t mean that you won’t see any performance improvements on 2.4 GHz. As the test will show you, they are actually a bit faster than the old models on 2.4 GHz as well.