Ubiquiti UAP-AC-Lite

At a glance
Product	Ubiquiti 802.11ac Dual Radio Access Point (UAP-AC-LITE)   [Website]
Summary	Inexpensive AC1200 class access point
Pros	• Many features including airtime fairness and band steering • Relatively inexpensive • Decent performance in multi-client load testing
Cons	• Meh performance • Can be hard to find features in Unifi GUI • Roaming speed not great unless signal levels are very low

Typical Price: $89  Buy From Amazon

We reviewed Ubiquiti's UAP-AC-Lite and PRO APs early this year, but retested them with the current Revision 10 process for this roundup. The Lite seems to be the product to beat, at least in the hearts and minds of the many SNBForum denizens who recommend it. But that could change by the time we're done.

The Lite is a smallish smoke-detector format AP measuring a little over 6" in diameter. It has a single gigabit Ethernet port and is powered only via PoE, which is now standard 802.3af vs. the passive 24V system originally used. Ubiquiti shared that is "silently" added support for 802.3af into Lite's manufactured starting September 2016. A 24V passive PoE adapter is included with each AC-Lite.

The AC-Lite uses a QCA9563/Ubiquiti U-AME-G1-BR4A combination. As in the EAP225, the third RF chain in the QCA9563 is not used. The OpenWRT wiki makes a good case that the Ubiquiti device is a custom-labeled Atheros AR9888.

Ubiquiti UAP-AC-Lite board

The rest of the key components are summarized in the table.

The full review describes Ubiquiti's UniFi management controller, which is available for Windows, MacOS and Debian and Ubuntu Linux. There's also the option of using the $80 Cloud Key controller. There's now an online UniFi demo you can check out, too.

UniFi controller dashboard

Ubiquiti continues to evolve UniFi and tweaking features. Unfortunately, they did not respond to our questions for this review, so the features shown below may not be accurate for the current UniFi 5.6.24 release. In general, the UniFi system has many features, although you may need to dig for them in the multi-level interface. Like Open Mesh, UniFi supports wireless AP backhaul.

Introduction D-Link DAP2610 Edimax CAP1200 Linksys LAPAC1200 NETGEAR WAC-505 Open Mesh A40 TP-Link EAP225 Ubiquiti UAP-AC-Lite ZyXEL NWA1123-ACv2 Performance Performance-more, Closing

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