Enlarge (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

Back in May, networking OEM Ubiquiti announced its new Ubiquiti Labs division and that division’s first product: a home mesh Wi-Fi system called Amplifi. With Amplifi, Ubiquiti intends to stretch its reach out of SMB/enterprise “lite” networking and into home territory—and not just the homes of crazies like me, either. Amplifi is targeted at the plug-and-play crowd for whom a single, central Wi-Fi base station doesn’t quite cut the mustard. It’s a market squarely occupied by Eero, Luma, and a few other players—home mesh Wi-Fi, where you throw down a few devices and every nook and cranny of your home gets solid coverage (in theory, at least).

Ubiquiti sent Ars a preproduction Amplifi unit last week, and I’ve spent the weekend getting some initial impressions. This isn’t going to be an exhaustive review, since I’ve only had a few days with the system, but my impressions so far are generally positive.

The quick takeaway

The Amplifi system isn’t something I’d buy for myself, but it is something I’d happily buy for my parents, who have a large home thanks to Houston’s absurdly cheap housing market and struggle to get solid Wi-Fi coverage throughout. Amplifi doesn’t support several features that I depend on (especially WPA2 Enterprise for 802.11x), but setup is painless, reasonably quick, and the handoff between the various mesh components works seamlessly. It’s also a competent router with an actual firewall (the device runs BusyBox and uses iptables under the hood). And, if you already have a router you’re happy with, it can function as a pure Wi-Fi access point and mesh network.