I finally got around to unboxing and playing with it…
First impressions, box and AP look nice!
AP feels heavy and substantial vs the Ubiquiti and Meraki APs i use for home, day job, biz. Not as hefty as Cisco APs but hey, Cisco APs cost and arm and a leg and with tech now a days, aren’t worth its weight in price anymore.
Unboxing…
Took me a minute to figure out how to setup the darn thing b/c the QR Code card slipped out of the box around my clutter of an office so i really thought there was no instructions for a sec. I eventually stumbled upon the card after i had connected the AP thinking i could connect via default SSID or IP address on the network… nope… So thankfully i found the card.
After QR code scanning, seemed pretty easy to follow the PDF guide your phone downloads. I might be old school but im usually using a computer to setup a bunch of APs and not my phone… and there was no App to download anyways but im sure thats coming out soon.
I was able to get into the console and set up an AP with my account which was automatically found which was nice but i can see if i ordered a bunch as a consultant for different clients, that might be a hassle to reset each one or remove from my account.
Setting up the SSIDs within the controller took a sec for me to click around but i’m fairly experienced so knew to move my mouse around to click everywhere but most of the configs were at the above tabs and not on icons for the device. Being able to setup multiple passwords for an SSID is pretty cool. I dont think i’ve seen that before and is great for quick pw setups for testing or password rolling. Thumbs up for this feature. I’m not sure how many SSID’s i can create so would be helpful to know for first time users.
App blocking feature is nice. Reminds me of pihole (would be interesting to be able to integrate that but not necessary). I tried a few blocks such as whatsapp which worked, facebook didnt seem to block the app or website on the phone but i didnt do extensive testing yet.
Dashboard can definitely use some graphical tweaks as Ubiquiti and Meraki are fairly easy to navigate buttttt Alta seems very promising so i’m still on the boat!
Will be messing with it more and gathering real world data usages to see where it falls as Ubiquiti is my standard for home and small biz while small/med biz is Meraki from my experience.