Robert J. Pera's weblog

UniFi’s Focus on Delivering Value and Our Commitment to User Experience Design

Perhaps the biggest technology story of this decade has been the emergence of the cloud. Applications based in the cloud have lead to breakthroughs in user experience, powering Industries from media streaming to social networks. In these applications, the cloud has enabled content distribution and user interaction with great performance on a massive scale across an entire connected world. But while cloud-centric product design originated to optimize user experience, other Industries embracing the cloud have done so for entirely different and less than admirable reasons. Specifically, the I.T. hardware Industry, leveraging much of the pervasive cloud marketing tail winds from other Industries, are aggressively pushing their own cloud based products to their customers. From a business model perspective, this makes perfect sense — why pursue a one time sale when you can sell hardware and charge people again and again in perpetuity to use the very same hardware? Perhaps even greater pressure derives from company valuation concerns. In today’s financial world, an exponentially greater valuation is attributed to a business that can successfully convince investors they have “subscribers” (re-occurring revenue) rather than plain old “customers.”

Whereas many applications utilizing cloud-centric designs do so with the primary intent of perfecting a user experience, the I.T. hardware Industry cloud initiatives in stark contrast aim to increase their company valuations, lock in their customer-bases, and essentially rip people off.

the I.T. hardware Industry cloud initiatives in stark contrast aim to increase their company valuations, lock in their customer-bases, and essentially rip people off.

The idea of a cloud based hardware controller certainly seems at least a bit ridiculous when considered with an unbiased mind. Why would anyone tolerate the exorbitant licensing fees and security concerns associated with purchased hardware that unnecessarily tethers to a 3rd party server? As it turns out, armies of sales people along with their collusions of profiting proprietors can be awfully convincing when pitching solutions that advance their own interests.

To be fair, there is one significant user-experience benefit of cloud based I.T. hardware systems and that is remote connectivity — the ability to monitor and configure multiple deployments from anywhere. But could this be achieved without passing on significant costs and security concerns to the customer?

 

UniFi Hybrid Cloud Approach Featuring CloudKey

Although marketed as a “cloud” key, this device simply brings the user-experience benefit of remote connectivity without requiring networking infrastructure hardware to be connected to the cloud. And it appears like the idea has been well received with UniFi approaching 1mm cloud key shipments in a relatively short period of time. The idea is simple — install a cloud key in your network and any admin can go to unifi.ui.com to access their networks from anywhere while still keeping their hardware free of licensing subscriptions.

The idea is simple — install a cloud key in your network and any admin can go to unifi.ui.com to access their networks from anywhere while still keeping their hardware free of licensing subscriptions.

The second generation cloud key has improved upon this concept with significantly better hardware performance, an intuitive LCD, bluetooth for mobile app connectivity, and support for HDD storage (1TB comes standard with the Plus version, upgradable to 5TB). The device is powerful enough to host additional applications with great scalability — including an all new video security system we call UniFi Protect. And just as our hybrid cloud approach was a breakthrough for networking, we believe the same approach has compelling potential in the video security Industry where Internet bandwidth utilization, privacy, and subscription fees all become drawbacks of cloud based network video recorders.

UniFi Protect — Hits on 5 Key User Experience Points

UniFi Protect was designed from the ground up with a focus on user-experience. We wanted to build something that could operate at scale within a small hardware footprint, providing a low-cost initial investment while offering the remote connectivity convenience of cloud based systems. I want to talk more about 5 key points of the design:

1. Usability:

The core transcoding framework has been designed to provide rapid searching of any recorded video as shown in the video below. And because we don’t require the camera HW to connect to the cloud, we can provide much faster in-network latency, crucial for future applications including 2-way audio.

2. Scalability:

The new cloud key can manage 20+ cameras while simultaneously providing UniFi network management and new hardware later this year will significantly increase camera scalability further. Installation is plug and play with Protect automatically detecting and adding new cameras as they come online. In addition to the mobile apps, we have a web UI that is suitable for monitoring hi-density camera installs.

3. No Subscription Fees:

While a single monthly fee might be a reasonable for the convenience of a single cloud camera, the proposition for a multi-camera network and multiple subscription fees quickly becomes unreasonable. With UniFi Protect, there are no subscription fees to worry about it whatsoever.

4. No Burden on your Internet bandwidth:

As resolutions (and bit rates) increase so do their corresponding utilization of Internet upload bandwidth. With multiple cloud cameras constantly uploading to the Internet, this will greatly reduce the effective bandwidth for users on the network. With UniFi Protect, the camera stream terminates at the Cloud Key and thus saves full Internet upload bandwidth for the clients of the network.

5. Completely Private:

Perhaps the general public isn’t fully aware of the magnitude of this privacy invasion. Cloud cameras forward video to 3rd party servers which means your life is really not private anymore and there is no guarantee that any recordings (including confidential events) will not be seen by others.

Cloud cameras forward video to 3rd party servers which means your life is really not private anymore and there is no guarantee that any recordings (including confidential events) will not be seen by others.

With UniFi Protect, recorded video is kept private; away from 3rd party servers.

The Hardware, Best in-class starting at $79 MSRP

The new G3-Flex is our most versatile and best price/performance camera to date. It can support practically any installation from resting on a table, mounting on a wall, ceiling, pole, or conduit. And it looks even better installed with a recessed mount.

The performance is also best in-class as compared to other brands below

In addition to the G3-Flex, we have recently introduced the G4-Pro camera with 3X optical zoom and 4K resolution; now available in our early access store. We look forward to introducing the rapidly expanding UniFi Protect line of products throughout this year.

Back in the early days, I was working with a customer to replace an older, slower 802.11b 2.4GHz mini-PCI radio with Ubiquiti’s latest SuperRange2 802.11g hi-power mini-PCI module.  Response to the SuperRange mini-PCI cards had been overwhelmingly positive, but this user was experiencing significantly worse performance post-upgrade.  At first I thought it was bad hardware and shipped another card, but the results did not change.  I then worked with him, trying to improve performance through several attempts at design modifications but also to no avail.

At that point, I bought a sample of the older 802.11b card at issue for myself, which was based on the Prism 2.5 chipset from Intersil.  And like the “Prism” name implies, I quickly saw that this older card although slower in max speed, had a radio design with a superior “selectivity” — the ability to filter out neighboring channels.

But, how could this be the case? The Super Range (Atheros 802.11a/b/g based) radios were the latest technology and I assumed it would outperform the older 802.11b technology in all areas. After taking apart the Intersil Prism radio, things became clearer.

The Intersil radio was based on a true “superheterodyne” receiver architecture where the carrier was down-converted to an Intermediate Frequency (IF) and filtered with a dedicated discrete filter. Meanwhile, the Atheros radio, was a completely integrated CMOS chipset without any off-chip IF filtering.

So what does this all mean? The ability to filter a radio signal largely depends on 2 things:

1. The fractional bandwidth:

Filtering out a 1MHz channel at 1GHz (.1% fractional bandwidth) is much harder than filtering out a 10MHz channel at 100MHz (10% fractional bandwidth)

 

2. The filter effectiveness:

A dedicated specialized filter is typically far superior than a filter integrated into an IC.

 

 

In the case of the Prism radio, it optimized both areas. By having a down-converted IF of 384MHz, it was able increase the filtering fractional bandwidth. And with a dedicated off-chip SAW (Surface Acoustic Wave) filter, it had a much more effective filter. In comparison, the Atheros radio was built for complete low-cost IC Integration and had neither. It might have performed well indoors, but in outdoor WISP applications, the Prism radio could survive in RF environments where the Atheros based radio had no chance.

 

Filtering in the Frequency Domain

This experience would plant the seed for what we ironically call our “Prism Technology” at Ubiquiti. We wanted a way to leverage the speeds of the latest WiFi chipset technology but also retain the great “selectivity” of the original Intersil Prism radios.

What we patented would be counterintuitive to most. We essentially put our own radio in front of the WiFi chipset radio. How does this exactly improve performance? The diagram below helps explains the concept

Our Prism technology receives the unlicensed band spectrum (5GHz or 2.4GHz), down converts to an intermediate frequency, applies specialized hi-selectivity filtering on the area of interest, and up converts the channel back to appear magically “clean” to the WiFi Radio.

We have proven selectivity improvements of up to 30dB. To put this in a linear perspective, our Prism Technology reduces noise seen by the Wifi radio by up to 1,000 times!

 

Filtering in the Spatial Domain

Horn antenna technology has been around for over a century, but only recently have they been attractive and proven to be successful in WISP applications. In the early days of this industry, antenna gain was most valued and traditional sectors and reflectors were best suited for deployments. Fast-forward to today, with billions of unlicensed radios in use worldwide, the ability of antenna isolation to mitigate noise is becoming more valuable. We want our antennas to only hear and talk in a single direction and “ignore” all other directions. Horn antennas do this exceptionally well.

The challenge for our antenna team at Ubiquiti was how do we take advantage of the RF isolation advantages of horns, but still maintain enough antenna gain required for high performance links?

The answer is what we call “asymmetrical horns” and we believe they are the future of WISP deployments

 

 

Filtering in the Time Domain

The 802.11 WiFi standard uses something called CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access / Collision Avoidance). It is a contention based protocol which means if all clients on a network can “hear” each other, everything can work well. But, in the case of outdoor networks and isolated directional links, most of the clients cannot hear each other and end up talking over one another. To solve this we introduced a TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) protocol where clients are assigned organized time windows to talk so they do not interfere with each other.

This was the essence of our AirMax TDMA protocol we have improved throughout the years. While this works well for clients connected to a single AP, what about interference issues with multiple APs co-located together?

Our all-new GPS synchronization protocol specifically addresses this challenge. PrismStation uses GPS to provide a global synchronization timer for potentially every deployment in the world. What this means is multiple BaseStations can work seamlessly on a single tower or neighboring towers and even using the same spectrum. And we can also achieve synchronization between AirMax and AirFiber Basestations (including our upcoming LTU technology)

 

We believe the culmination of technologies driving 3-Domain Filtering (Frequency, Spatial, Time) will enable the next stage of high-performance, high-density AirMax networks throughout the world.  We are really proud to bring this product to market and hope it will be the weapon that operators can use to fight and build higher performance networks even in the presence of increasing amounts of RF noise in the unlicensed bands.

How An Outdoor Wireless Company Entered the Enterprise WiFi Market

Perhaps now hard to believe, Ubiquiti’s decision to enter a new market with the introduction of UniFi in 2010 was generally criticized. At that time, some questioned why a company driving explosive growth in the outdoor Wireless Internet Service Provider Industry would risk diverting their focus. Others questioned how Ubiquiti, having less than 25 employees and none of them marketing or sales people, could possibly enter a market dominated by traditional sales models. Nevertheless, I saw an Industry ripe for disruption and a perfect opportunity for us to leverage our core strengths.

Exactly why was it so compelling? In 2009, if you took apart a $1,000+ “Enterprise WiFi” AP and compared it to a <$50 consumer WiFi AP, you would see 90% component/material overlap. Enterprise vendors were essentially over-engineering consumer WiFi reference designs for often little more than incremental performance benefit and then dramatically over-charging for them. Ubiquiti’s past success was attributed to a completely opposite philosophy — making designs more cost-efficient (while enhancing performance) and passing savings on to the customer. And our increasing economy of scale at this point (1mm+ AirMax radios/ yr) reinforced what I saw as an excellent Enterprise WiFi opportunity. I believed a solution at just a fraction of the cost combined with a basic features set and some “Ubiquiti magic” would find its way to disrupting the market and breaking the established IT sales dynamics.

What exactly do I mean by “Ubiquiti magic?” Well, market timing and cost-disruption alone do not make a disruptive product. If they did, then many vendors focused on low-cost hardware plays wouldn’t be struggling with marketshare and achieving profitability. There is a reason why Ubiquiti, a cost leader, is also by many metrics the most profitable hardware company in the world. Making disruptive products also requires a kind of design magic — something that conveys to the customer qualities of premium craftsmanship, thoughtful usability, and ingenuity which in turn spark intrigue and evangelism. In fact, many people think it was our user community that lifted our brand and products to success, but it very likely was the other way around.

Here are a few examples of “Ubiquiti magic” inherent in the UniFi platform launch in 2010:

1. The “UniFi” marketing brand

“Uni” — which means to combine multiple pieces into one; paired with “WiFi” creates “UniFi” — the perfect name for a system that manages multiple WiFi AP’s within a single control plane. Even better, this word transcends languages nicely — this is important as non-native English speakers makeup a big part of our customer base.

2. The industrial design

Inspired by the Airport Extreme project I worked on at Apple, but optimized for wall and ceiling installation. Lower-profile dimensions for a seamless mounted presentation and antenna patterns optimized to direct energy angled out. A glowing circular LED ring was used to give the product a “personality” that changed colors according to device state. (a design element that was quite original at the time)

3. The 3-Pack

Also a unique idea at the time was the AP 3-pack which framed the marketing message that UniFi was a scalable system. (Today we have evolved to 5-packs to support the higher installation count of typical UniFi deployments)

The Performance Story

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To those who have followed UniFi’s history, it is no secret that we struggled post-launch to improve performance and quality of the platform. Following the initial success of the product, we urgently needed to improve across multiple areas including feature expansion, wireless performance, better quality control, and more attention to user experience. Disappointingly, we just failed to execute. So what exactly happened? Sometimes a development team that is good in taking a project from concept to market is not the team best suited to scale and perfect. Eventually we made the tough decision to pivot towards a complete restructuring of the platform development team and strategy. (Similar to our pivots in the Airmax world at around the same time).

As a result of these changes, we started executing far more effectively across all key performance areas of the platform as well as introducing new products and technologies at a rapid pace. While it may have looked like growth was slowing just a couple years ago, UniFi is now re-accelerating, growing faster than ever before and recently becoming the highest volume shipping Enterprise WiFi platform in the world. Even more exciting, we are on the brink of a second-wave of disruption, attacking the higher ends of the market and not because of cost, but because many believe UniFi is now simply the best all-around performing platform in the Industry and here is why:

1. Performance

A true enterprise WiFi AP today should be fast, resilient, and reliable. It should be near-ethernet speed under light load, provide solid performance and low-latency under heavy loads and interference, as well as maintain stability at all times — even when faced with possibly any of thousands of older quirky 802.11 legacy devices fighting for air time. The UniFi platform was always effective in delivering elegant AP management, but it wasn’t until last year that we achieved true enterprise wireless performance — and we haven’t stopped there. In fact, by many accounts, UniFi has now quickly ascended to be the top performing WiFi Solution in the Industry.

To get to this level of performance has been an exercise in persistently testing and optimizing of the wireless driver performance with rapid iteration. In fact, we have built teams to develop tools just to allow us to conduct testing more efficiently. These tools combined with the transparent feedback of our community, who have collectively deployed 10mm+ AP’s, has enabled us to make excellent progress in a short amount of time.

2. User Experience

IT solutions are generally intimidating to operate and have configuration interfaces proprietary in nature. Traditional companies have used these as an advantage by creating training and certification classes which “lock in” system integrators after they have invested into the deep learning curve. We have taken a very different approach. While UniFi has tons of advanced functionality, we constantly strive to build a user experience that is visually intuitive and can very quickly be mastered by nearly anyone with a general networking background. Furthermore, the UniFi interface is designed to elegantly manage different technologies across different geographic locations all within a single framework.

3. Customer Service

It is widely known that Ubiquiti hosts a powerful community of system integrators who, together with our R&D, evangelize, improve, and support the UniFi platform. But UniFi also offers very responsive email support and real-time 24/7 online chat built into the controller, available free of charge.

4. WiFi Product Breadth

UniFi offers a comprehensive family of Access Points covering various applications including outdoor wifi, hospitality, education, and enterprises — each with unique form-factors designed specifically for their application use.

5. Feature Expansion

The UniFi team continues to expand the platform with new features including Integrated Radius server with insights for advanced installations, fully customizable hotspots with detailed analytics, as well as powerful deep-packet inspection reporting to characterize network use.

6. Technology Expansion

While UniFi is known as a WiFi system, it is rapidly expanding to adjacent technologies. The UniFi switching portfolio is quickly gaining market share and we are focused this year on bringing higher-end gateways, application servers, and other technologies to market — all managed within the UniFi controller.

 A Second Wave of Disruption

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Interestingly, while UniFi’s performance has dramatically improved over the past couple years, we have been even more aggressive in our pricing strategy. For example, where our top selling 802.11n UAP Pro was priced at $229 MSRP, we introduced our UAP AC PRO (with several times higher performance) at $149 MSRP. We followed this up with very low entry points for our UAP AC Mesh and UAP AC Inwall each at $99 MSRP as well as with our hi-density POE Switching family also starting at $99 MSRP.

The obvious question — why would we sacrifice margins and profitability when we don’t have to? While it is true the above products would still be successful even at significantly higher pricing, we made a conscience decision to reduce short-term profits in an effort to maximize UniFi brand awareness, build greater long-term competitive advantage, and force the Industry’s attention to our marketshare gains. In turn, our hope was that UniFi’s performance could stand on its own and ultimately be recognized as a legitimate solution for higher-end markets.

And just as we hoped, UniFi (even without a sales force behind it) is now starting to make its way up-market into a more demanding customer base — one who values performance just as much as price. And in preparation of this next phase of evolution, we have been working towards a new product portfolio along with an advanced hosting and support solution . Specifically our “HD and “XG” series of products brings high density client support and 10Gigabit performance across WiFi AP’s, switches, and gateways. These new products are complimented by our UniFi Elite service launching this year that will offer a complete hosting solution, advanced RMA replacement, lifetime warranty, and expert-level phone support.

 

Ten years ago, Ubiquiti was just a new entrant in the WISP Industry, known to be little more than a manufacture of niche mini-PCI radio cards that could be used with Mikrotik router boards.  At that time, I saw the writing on the wall as Mikrotik was starting to bring to market their own radio cards.  They had a complete monopoly on the growing WISP Industry with a decade head start and an operator customer base they built around their routing software foundation.  However, I saw a critical flaw in their strategy that could possibly be exploited.  Mikrotik believed in an after-market assembly world where they would market hardware and 3rd party companies would supply the mechanicals, antennas, and cable components for WISP’s to assemble solutions themselves for deployment.  But, I saw the future differently — I believed WISP’s would welcome product integration with a greater attention to user experience.

 

Ubiquiti at that time was made up of just a handful of people.  Myself and Patrick Jabbaz worked together on the schematic design, he owned the layout and digital design while I owned the RF Design, radio tuning, and manufacturing testing.  Also around that time, we put together a small talented developer team in Lithuania who worked on our firmware called “AirOS” and we hired a mechanical design consultant as well as an antenna design consultant which would help us in our first foray into manufacturing a complete product.  Like all airMAX products since, I have taken an “outside in” design approach where I worked with the designer on my vision for the product first and then we customized the hardware and antenna to accommodate.

PowerStation

 

This project we would market as “PowerStation” and I hoped it would become an Industry standard for CPE deployments.  The initial response in our U.S. channels was positive and we received orders for several thousand units.  It was at this time, I took my first trip around the world with a PowerStation sample in hand to try and garner international channel interest.  Within a couple weeks, I would travel from California to  South America and Africa, then on to Russia, the Middle East, Europe, and finally on to Asia.  By the time I was finishing the trip, I had become quite demoralized.  While the PowerStation design was acknowledged as being beautiful in appearance, it was universally criticized as very expensive, bulky, and impractical for the various emerging markets we were targeting.  Why? The Power station was large and heavy making it problematic for shipping and with a manufacturing cost of nearly $100, it just could not be competitive in these markets where solutions assembled using components from Asia were being sold at nearly 1/4 the price.

Even worse, after I got home and shortly after shipping PowerStations into the U.S., we began seeing numerous quality and performance issues from firmware crashes to reports of our high-gain antenna not having any gain at all.   The situation was a mess — I was frustrated having little gained from all the development efforts, nervous at the prospect of not being able to compete in the market as Mikrotik was quickly moving to lower cost solutions and solidifying their lead, and concerned financially  — speculating how much this misstep would cost us as Ubiquiti was a completely bootstrapped operation.

NanoStation

But sometimes your best ideas and achievements arise in times of great adversity and in those next days, we took a hard look at the PowerStation design as well as what I learned from my recent travels.  What struck me now about the Powerstation’s mechanical design (which followed traditional practice) was it’s over-complexity with several plastic parts, various waterproofing gaskets, and heavy die cast parts for the antenna ground plane and hardware enclosure.  Coincidentally at around the same time, Motorola had a popular product gaining attention called “Canopy” that was priced far too expensively for the emerging markets that I sought after, but was very successful with higher-end WISP in the U.S.  What intrigued me most about their design was a very simple plastic bucket enclosure that was light-weight, low-part count, and eliminated all of the complex weatherproof gasketing.

Within the next 6 months, Patrick and I executed on a new product idea from concept to volume shipping (an outstanding achievement) that would be known as “NanoStation”  Where as PowerStation was bulky and over-engineered, NanoStation exemplified minimalist design.  We found new mechanical engineering resources and inspired by Motorola’s direction, made the industrial design even sleeker as well as took advantage of the full PCBA backside and using it as a ground plane for a cost-effective dual-polarity directive antenna array (which was designed successfully this time).  Plus we even integrated a software selectable external antenna connector.  We essentially added the directional antenna and weatherproofing around the hardware for only a few dollars in a way that integrated seamlessly.  We also had the fortunate timing of solving critical SW issues on the heels of the failed PowerStation experience.

As soon as we had NanoStation prototypes ready, I went back around the world to pitch the new product to the same international channels, and the demand was overwhelming.  Supply constrained, we would ship over one million NanoStations within that next year — it was the company’s first growth inflection point.

 

airMAX Software Strategy Coming Together At Long Last:  A Complete Set of Software Technologies

 

Bringing NanoStation to the WISP Industry put us on the map, but our ambitions have always been much greater.  We have never settled for being a typical equipment provider.  We do not market to big telecom carriers nor have sales teams.  Instead we opted to disrupt the status quo.  We wanted to give the tools to any ambitious entrepreneur — even ones without financial backing or technical training  — to compete in the big carrier dominated ISP Industry.  We created a community platform where  these very entrepreneurs could share experiences to help make our collective technology better.  One way I like to think of our strategy is essentially supplying the slingshot in David’s fight against Goliath.

Unfortunately, as many of you know first-hand, we have had bumps along the way towards reaching our end vision .  But just like how we hard pivoted successfully from our failed PowerStation product to NanoStation, we have made hard pivots in our development strategy over the past couple years that have achieved outstanding results.

On the software side, I believe we have finally achieved a true end-to-end solution for operators to not only deploy and manage their networks, but also to scale their business.  This impressive collection of software resources Ubiquiti provides free of charge in an effort to “level the playing field” against larger carriers with more financial resources.

From link planning (AirLink), to deployment ease (U-Mobile), radio optimization (AirOS), network management (AirControl), and business operations (UCRM), we are empowering this Industry with an unprecedented software technology arsenal.

Radio Configuration and Link Viewing — The New AirOS

Nearly all WISP products (including prior airMAX/AirOS technology) have UI design roots based in the WiFi router world.  But where as WiFi routers are deployed in indoor environments, outdoor wireless is about long distances links focused between two points in a widely varying and difficult to assess outdoor environment

Looking at things from this perspective, I realized a good UI for WISP applications should sharply focus on providing insight into the outdoor environment and how it affects a specific long distance link.

Our development team has done a fantastic job in creating by far the most impressive WISP product UI brought to market.  The new AirOS quickly gives insight into link distance and settings, capacity in each direction, and air-time.  In addition, it gives the operator an instant overview of the total spectrum behavior (powered by our dedicated AirView “always-on” spectral analyzer radio) as well as provides fantastic insight into the relationship between signal strength, modulation, and capacity.  Finally, cumulative distribution charts give insight into the links time-dependent variation.

 

 

Radio Deployment — The New U-Mobile (both Android and iPhone support)

 

In less than a year, UniFi mobile has in excess of 120,000 active users and over 1 million downloads!  So, the thought occurred to us — let’s put the same team on building an equivalent app for the airMAX world!  With this plan in mind, we designed into all airMAX AC Gen2 hardware (more on this later) an additional dedicated U-Mobile management radio allowing for a direct connection to any smartphone or tablet via wifi, greatly improving the deployment experience.

Network Analysis — The New AirLink

AirLink has been successful as a simple point-to-point performance estimator, but in order to make it a  powerful tool WISP’s can use to better understand their existing networks, we are introducing terrain signal mapping for multipoint coverage analysis to greatly reduce the need for in person site surveys.  AirLink will also have an increasingly important role in our future WISP technology roadmap.

Network Monitoring and Management — The New AirControl

Yes, AirControl has a history of stumbling.  The original AirControl had a well-received WebUI, but was quite sluggish.  The upgraded AirControl2 was very fast and scalable, but required Java to the dismay of a large part of the market.  The “cloud” aspirations of AirCRM was poorly architected.  We finally took a step back, came up with a final plan and have executed very well in the past couple years.

The new AirControl (v2.x to be exact) has taken the best pieces of the past experiences.  It has a powerful and scalable back-end (like AirControl2), an elegant WebUI foundation with rapid feature development (much like UniFi), and a native development path to optional cloud hosting.

Customer and Operations Management — The New UCRM

As with AirControl, UCRM development had some challenges, but in the past year, a new team has done a fantastic job in making it into an outstanding tool.  UCRM offers tight levels of integration between Ubiquiti device management and customer management  such as customer Internet access suspension for past due bills and advanced QoS controls. With nearly 1,0000 WISP’s using UCRM in it’s early stages of development, we are hoping the solution helps to solve many of the challenges associated with scaling from a start-up WISP to a large service provider business.

New Generation 2 airMAX AC Hardware

Traditionally, we have designed airMAX technology for long-distance open-environment links.  In this case, antenna gain is king as higher signal strength leads to higher modulation rates and increased capacity.  This was the logic behind our hi-gain dishes, sectors, and integrated radio products.  However, a strong focus of our “Generation 2” airMAX AC hardware development was urban deployments where signal containment (and noise isolation) were often more important than pure link gain.

The IsoStation is a die-cast metal enclosed airMAX AC Gen2 radio that comes standard with a 45deg 15dBi horn antenna that has phenomenal energy isolation performance and is designed specifically to perform well in the harshest of RF environments.  The PrismStation takes the concept to the next level — bringing our Prism active RF-filtering (in addition to the extreme antenna energy isolation) performance to the radio.  Either product can be used as either an AP or a Station and can be upgraded with a variety of aftermarket horn antennas with varying coverage patterns.

Urban vs. Rural

 

IsoStation & PrismStation

 

The PrismStation and IsoStation (along with all Gen2 hardware), contain an independent AirView spectral analysis radio as well as a dedicated wifi management radio allowing U-Mobile support from any tablet or smartphone.  In addition, Gen2 hardware ESD protection has been significantly enhanced in attempt to eliminate ethernet field failures.  Best of all, the receivers of Gen2 radios have been redesigned with hardware tricks we have learned allowing them to be further resilient to RF noise.

Finally, the LiteBeam and PowerBeam Gen2 hardware have significantly improved mechanical mounting.

 

 

 

Breakthrough airMAX Wireless Performance

Perhaps the most important focus of our recent airMAX development was improving the upgrade path of new networks from airMAX to airMAX AC.  Although it has been a challenging past few years, we finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.  Recent AirOS firmware advances (especially with V8.1), have shown terrific results in adding airMAX AC radios to existing airMAX networks.  Combined with Generation 2 hardware improvements, airMAX

 AC is now consistently outperforming expectations.

Coming Up Next….

 

Part 1: From Apple AirPort to AmpliFi Mesh Technology

Robert J. Pera
Robert Pera started his career at Apple Computer, where he was a hardware engineer following M.S. and B.S. studies in Electrical Engineering. From there he went on to boot-strap Ubiquiti, providing connectivity technology bridging the digital divide for hundreds of millions of people around the globe while also becoming a model of efficient business operations — organically evolving from boot-strapped startup to a public company with billions of dollars in historical revenue and an operating margin profile of 37% — one of the best in the industry. He is also the Controlling Owner of the Memphis Grizzlies franchise of the National Basketball Association.

A long time ago (at least in technology years and even before iTunes or iPhone), I started my career at Apple Computer as part of the wireless hardware team where my initial project would become the industry’s first 802.11g router with a blazing top speed of 54 Mbps! (Pretty fast at the time — this was 2003.)

The Apple Airport Router
Although that design is well over a decade old, its impact on the next generation of wireless routers is now evident. The Apple Airport product family did a couple of things very well. The first was a smoother user experience which integrated into OS X auto-detection and a configuration utility. The second was an impressive industrial design which integrated the antennas inside a slick-looking enclosure making them invisible from the outside.

(Nearly all the “mesh Wi-Fi” entrants into the consumer space now market around these at one time very unique attributes of the original Apple Airport design.)

 

UniFi Enterprise Wi-Fi Technology
Years later, I would draw inspiration from the Apple Airport when designing the now ubiquitous UniFi wireless Access Point. For those not familiar with UniFi, it is a software defined networking (SDN) platform from Ubiquiti Networks (www.ubnt.com) which allows multiple networking devices (routers, switches, AP’s, and more) to be “unified” across unlimited geography and managed within a single software controller. Recent advances in features and performance have accelerated its growth into becoming the highest volume shipping “Enterprise” (or managed) Access Point in the world with increasing shipments of several millions units per year. UniFi systems are now ubiquitously deployed in hotels, schools, offices, airports, and more.

The industrial design of the UniFi access points draws inspiration from the original Apple Airport router I worked on, but utilizes a much slimmer profile — specifically for aesthetic placement on walls and ceilings. It also has a defining “personality LED” in the form of a glowing ring which can change colors or blink to describe the state of the AP.

 

This year, Ubiquiti Labs has introduced UniFi’s little brother to the world: AmpliFi. If the goal of “UniFi” was to unify enterprise networking deployments for central management, the goal of “AmpliFi” is to amplify modern home network coverage and performance — essentially eliminating dead spots throughout every square foot of every home.

Often when starting a project, we draw inspirations from other great designs. In the case of AmpliFi, there were two specific industrial designs that gave our team inspiration. The first was a product from Apple that I consider a classic in the history of industrial design: the G4 cube. Why the cube? Because it looks fantastic on a desk. Whereas UniFi AP’s were designed to look “complete” when installed on a ceiling or wall, I felt the cube was the starting point for a router design because it just looks “complete” sitting on a shelf or desk.

The second was the Nest Thermostat. Specifically, its circular LCD has a “wow” factor which is also quite useful in providing status and feedback.

 

If you look closely at AmpliFi’s router design, then you can spot the inspirations from not only the G4 cube and Nest Thermostat, but also from UniFi as well. Because the UniFi AP is defined by its “personality LED”, I wanted to port it to AmpliFi to provide some kind of continuity between the designs. In this case, the personality LED “glows” from the base of the unit and is also controllable by the AmpliFi mobile app.

 

As with many great designs, you will find a level of attention to detail inside the product that matches that of the outside. The AmpliFi router’s challenge was to reconcile 3 critical design requirements to optimize form and function as described below:

1. Physical footprint
No one wants a device that takes up a lot of desk space and so we needed to compact AmpliFi’s footprint as much as possible. We managed to get AmpliFi Router’s footprint down to a very slim size, less than 4 inches in each dimension.

 

2. Antenna performance
Good antenna range performance is correlated with physical area and isolation, which is why best performing range AP’s have antennas that stick out. We took advantage of the cube geometry and dedicated the full top half of the product to a well isolated 3×3 MIMO “Super Antenna” which beats out every router we have tested with traditional external antennas in range performance comparison testing.

 

3. Thermal performance
AmpliFi’s combination of dual‑radio 3×3, 1750 Mbps performance along with
5-port Gigabit switch plus Bluetooth and separate controllers for audio and the LCD require hardware placement spacing and airflow considerations. We split up the boards into a stacking style and below an independent ground plane. This provides increased airflow while keeping the footprint small and providing great isolation between the hardware electronics and antenna for great wireless performance.

 

For me personally, using great new products and being able to trace back their inspirations through design observations is highly enlightening. Although often invisible to the end market, nearly every innovation, from smartphones to electric cars, has been an exercise in leveraging and improving previous innovations in creative ways that tap into new value.

Ubiquiti was in a unique position to solve the general dissatisfaction with consumer Wi-Fi technology by leveraging my personal experience in the original Apple Airport Router product designs combined with our development experience and IP from the Enterprise Wi-Fi UniFi platform (which is quickly becoming the standard for high-performance Wi-Fi applications in professional applications). The result is the elegant AmpliFi Mesh Wi-Fi technology platform which we hope will set a new standard for consumer Wi-Fi networking design and performance.

This week I was in Memphis to talk with the local media.  Although I am not the most experienced public speaker, it was a lot of fun and I am very thankful to the city and people of Memphis for their warm welcome.

Memphis Grizzlies – Ownership Introduction from Robert J Pera on Vimeo.

Ubiquiti Networks has engineering offices in San Jose, Los Angeles, Irvine, Chicago, Kaunas (Lithuania), Moscow, and Taipei.  Even though we only have upwards of 100 employees, it is quite the geographic mix.  Ironically, we never intended to build these remote offices and we never had aspirations to save costs on engineering salaries. We just somehow managed to recruit outstanding people (irrespective of location), and over time, teams and offices naturally grew around them.

I often enjoy traveling to the different offices and helping make sure each one has what it needs to be successful in product development.  Over the past several years, I have flown 1,000’s of hours in the air and I have trained myself to the point where I will naturally fall asleep as soon as I get on plane.  It does not matter where in the world or what time, typically I will be asleep on the plane before it takes off through when it lands.

Today, on the flight back home, I happened to wake up early and was able to check out a movie called “Waiting for Superman” which details the state of the country’s educational system.  I was so intrigued by the film that I went on to do some further research.  I thought I would share what I found:

For those of you who are fans of the book “Freakenomics,” you might recall that in 2001, Steven Levitt (University of Chicago) and John Donohue (Yale University), published a paper titled “The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime.”  Backed by compelling statistics, they claimed that the Roe vs. Wade decision of 1973, in which the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion, directly resulted in the sharp decrease in crime rates seen in the 1990’s.

Their argument is that this legalized abortion had a compelling side effect  — it essentially reduced the number of unwanted children typically growing up in severely underprivileged circumstances that would eventually go on to lead criminal adult lives.

Now, if their argument were true, it would appear that by extension, the key to a brighter future depends on finding a way to solve the problem of underprivileged circumstances altogether, right?

The documentary “Waiting for Superman” is a study of how we are failing to deliver a quality education to much of today’s youth. It argues that the poor performance of the U.S. public school system is directly related to the poor quality of its teachers.  And changing the situation is incredibly difficult because of the highly inefficient government educational bureaucracies combined with the change-resistant national teacher’s union who stand in the way of improving teacher quality and performance.

One of the most interesting scenes of the film shows the ill-effects of a system that accumulates bad teachers combined with a union which makes it nearly impossible to fire any of them once they enter the system.   New York’s “rubber room” is a building where teachers who are on job related probation are required stay while they await their disciplinary hearing – a wait that takes on average 3 years! Here, they spend their days collecting full pay and benefits basically doing nothing at a cost of $100mm/year to the state of New York.

Another memorable scene studies the statistics of a Pennsylvania jail in a failing school district where 68% of the inmates were highschool dropouts.   The inmates stay inside the jail at a cost to the state of $33,000/year per inmate.  Meanwhile, the cost of the average private school tuition in the country is just $8,300 year.  For ¼ the amount, the inmates could have been sent to private school as youths, highly unlikely to have ended up in jail in first place, and possibly paying taxes and contributing to the work force as well.

Charter Schools

“Charter Schools” have recently been promoted as a solution to the failing performance of the current educational system.  Charter Schools are public schools funded by public money, but completely redesigned and free of the agents resistent to change in the current system  They are backed by philanthropists and business leaders such as Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, and Pitt Hyde; and aim to bridge the inequality between the privileged top private schools and the failing public schools throughout the country.  Charter schools believe in smaller class sizes, longer school days, and tighter screening of teacher quality.  Although there are statistics showing that some charter schools have been very successful, other studies show that their overall test scores have not yet shown significant improvement compared with the existing public school system.

FINLAND

After reading conflicting accounts about the success of Charter Schools, I proceeded to research who had the best educational system in the world.   It turned out to be the Scandinavian country of Finland (home of Nokia).  Finland has consistently ranked at the top of the world in educational test results across virtually every standard.  Here are a few of the philosophies from Finland’s educational system that I am most impressed with:

Disciplined Pursuit of Perfecting the Teaching Profession: Teachers are very highly respected in the country and becoming a teacher in Finland’s school system is even more difficult than becoming a doctor or lawyer.  All teachers are required to obtain a masters degree and gaining entrance into these programs is highly competitive with only 10% of the applicants being accepted.

Even though the new teachers are highly qualified, they still go the extra mile.  Groups of these “student teachers” will regularly visit schools and sit in on classes for years before actually teaching lessons.  After sitting in on the lessons, the student teachers will congregate with senior teachers in feedback discussions about how lessons can be further improved.

Encouraging Student “Discovery”:  While an average teacher spends 1100 hours per year in a classroom in which they dominate 85% of the spoken words, in Finland teachers spend just 600 hours in the classroom and it is the students who speak 60% of the time.  There is very little homework (a few hours per week), very little testing, and no “tracking” or separating students based on their learning ability.  In fact, teachers often stay with a core group of students for several years and focus on how each child learns.  Different teaching styles are adopted as needed to fit individual students.  Finnish teachers say they don’t want students to learn lessons; but rather “discover” lessons.

Designed for the Modern World:  Finland’s students are introduced to hands-on learning involving computers and electronics at an early age.  In addition, lessons in entrepreneurship and innovation are embedded across the school system.   But, what is most interesting to me is that high school diverges into two separate tracks:  there is a general track which leads to higher studies as well as a vocational track that focuses on hands-on engineering skills, immediately preparing students for the work place.  Interestingly, 40% of the students voluntarily choose the vocational, hands-on track

There is a great documentary done by Harvard’s Tony Wagner that can be viewed here that covers a lot of the above: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up0JdxYl5h0

My Closing Thoughts:

Finland’s system reminds me of a great “company culture” which empowers the value creators (in this case the teachers) to collaborate, innovate, and focus on a quality product (the students).   As Steve Jobs might say – it is an environment, which promotes “A” players working together with other “A” players, and everyone sharing a disciplined focus on constantly advancing the quality of the product.

The U.S. system in contrast has many attributes of a bloated, inefficient company that has been over-run by “C” players who are blinded by self-preservation and politics with little care for product quality (the students).

So how do you fix it?  I think the Charter school idea is a good start.  One of the strategies I have used in growing Ubiquiti is identifying great products and finding the people behind them.  So, why not just recruit Finland’s leading educational system brain trust and employ them to develop a charter school system here in the U.S.?

 

Over the past decade, electronics manufacturing has largely shifted into China because of cost-savings.  However, these cost-savings can often be misleading as manufacturing in China also comes with the risk of IP theft that can potentially lead to financial damages far in excess of the capital saved in manufacturing there.

As a hi-volume hardware manufacturing shipping millions of devices per year, Ubiquiti Networks partners with contract manufactures based in China.  For entrepreneurs looking at manufacturing in China, I want to give some advice in hopes of preparing others for the potential dangers they may face.

Before I start, I want to point out something that is often not communicated enough to the Western World regarding business ethics and the general integrity of the justice system in China.  Looking at the country of China as whole and making generalities about the business culture is somewhat unfair.  It is well known that China has the largest population of any country in the world, but it is not as well known that it is very much still a country with a great range of internal variance (probably more so than any country in the World) when it comes to the evolution of business ethics and intellectual property protection amongst its 23 provinces.  (to be exact, 23 provinces, 4 directly administered cities, 2 special-administered regions (HK/Macau), and 5 self-administered regions by ethnic minorities such as Tibet and Inner Mongolia)

In fact, a friend of mine in China summarized the variance best when he broke down 3 regions

 

-In Shanghai the attitude can best be expressed by the phrase: 上面说行才行 – meaning don’t do it unless the authorities say it’s ok to do it

 

-In Beijing, it’s 上面没说不行就行 – if the authorities didn’t say don’t do it, it is ok to do it

 

-And in Shenzhen, 上面说不行也行 – do it even if the authorities say you can’t do it

 

Unfortunately for Western technology companies, a large part of manufacturing today takes place in the Shenzhen region.

With that, here are my 3 pieces of advice

1. Take what your contract manufacturing partner tells you with a grain of salt: When you first engage with a manufacturing partner in China, they will likely tell you “We will sign an NDA” or  “we have a very strict information policy” or “we have very tight security”, etc. in an effort to make you feel comfortable that your IP can be protected in their hands.  Reality often deviates from words. The motivation for factory personnel to leak IP or take their manufacturing and project experience to lucrative counterfeiter operations is very high.  This is especially true if they are based in the Shenzhen region.  It is therefore very important to do reality checks with your partners to make sure they have effective internal IP protection processes and are in fact doing their best to protect your IP.  If they are not, it is time to change partners.
2. Apply for IP registration in China in advance:  Registering trademarks and patents in China is a long process that can take years.  You must start this process immediately and ideally well in advance of any plans to manufacture there.  Enforcing this IP in certain parts of the country can be very difficult, but there is a more important reason for filing.  There will be others in China that will attempt to fraudulently file your IP once you show up on their radar and will look for ways to use it to profit at your expense.
3. Use manufacturing IP to protect your product IP:  This is the most valuable piece of information I can give.  If you can protect your product IP at the source (manufacturing level), the potential agents of IP theft can be effectively neutralized.  At Ubiquiti, we developed a powerful system of product counterfeit protection that is virtually unbreakable.  It consists of (a) a security IC with a “a unique water mark signature”, (b) a software application running on a test station that loads the binary firmware image on to the hardware, and (c) a cloud based server which authorizes only stations with approved IP and MAC addresses, authenticates loading instances based on cryptography involving several dynamic values as well as the security IC signature; and logs all activity.  The system also uses passwords that must be changed on a frequent basis at the manufacturing line.  Using an anti-counterfeit mechanism such as the one described is your best protection against the future threat of rogue counterfeit manufacturing facilities.

 

Last weekend I had the pleasure of having dinner with Pitt Hyde, the Founder of AutoZone (NYSE:AZO) and just an overall impressive, humble, and great person.  Perhaps my favorite story of his was when he recounted his time serving on Sam Walton’s Walmart Board of Directors in the early days of his company.  According to Pitt, Sam would pick him up from the airport in a run-down car and take him back to the Walmart offices where they would prop up a fold out table and chairs to have their board meeting.

Apparently when Sam Walton was first starting his business, he had a unique vision where he could serve the underserved communities – areas in which larger store chains did not want to enter as they found it impossible to make profitable business cases for doing so.  Not only did Walton succeed in his strategy, he was able to make his business immensely profitable.

“Once committed to discounting, Walton began a crusade that lasted the rest of his life: to drive costs out of the merchandising system wherever they lay—in stores, in the manufacturers’ profit margins and with the middleman—all in the service of driving prices down, down, down,”

–John Huey, 1998 Fortune Magazine(also co-authored Walton’s autobiography)

Walton started from humbling beginnings and was seen as an underdog with an unorthodox strategy, but through the years, Walton was not only able to apply his strategy effectively to underserved markets, but eventually would grow to dominate the whole country en route to becoming the largest revenue company in the entire World.

Today when people ask me to compare Ubiquiti Networks strategy, business model, and story to another company, I like to believe it’s most similar to Sam Walton and his early days in starting Walmart.  We have found a way to deliver powerful and sophisticated plug and play hi-tech connectivity solutions to underserved areas of the world while making a profitable business out of it.  Unlike other companies in our space competing for existing market share, Ubiquiti has created new markets and opportunities that didn’t exist before in places such as Africa, South America, Middle East, India, and China.  Although we are in the very early stages of the company and predominately represented in underserved areas of the world, I also aspire to drive Ubiquiti’s transformation from David to Goliath one day just as Walton did.