Power Consumption
Power consumption at idle comes in at 6.8w measured from the wall. When running iPerf tests power consumption rises to 8.8w. The device gets slightly warm to the tough however it’s not alarming.
Performance Of The NanoBeam AC Gen 2
The devices come with a built in speed test. I use this to check the devices have a strong connection. However I’ll be running iPerf between clients on each end for performance numbers.
The reason I run iPerf is because the built in speed test doesn’t paint a true picture on the performance you will get. Real world results are ~150mbit for me as below iPerf test shows. Note that the only performance bottleneck is the NanoBeam AC Gen 2 and crossing the subnet isn’t a bottleneck.
Watching the CPU usage shows it’s underpowered and overwhelmed. As you can see here when I run iPerf the utilization whips up to 80-100%. I don’t have any fancy features running other then VLANs going over the interface.
Even with the performance being what it is it does the job well. NAS access is snappy, documents open immediately and video plays back smoothly. There are really no downsides performance wise to note for my case fortunately. Performance drops on a simple configuration due to lacking CPU performance will take some points.
Conclusion and Thoughts
The Ubiquiti NanoBeam AC Gen2 is overall a great product so long as you don’t need it’s maximum advertised bandwidth. The CPU is anemic, causing lower performance in the 150-180mbit range at best. Also it’s unfortunate to see it using 24v PoE as it’s proprietary. 48v PoE 802.3af would be preferable here. On a more positive note, setup is painless and straightforward. The software feels first class and you will be up and running within minutes. A lot of thought has gone in to installation. The ball mount is genius and provided is a stainless steel hose clamp for attaching the device to a pole which works well. My recommendation is to go for it if you need reliability rather than performance. Also if you use this for internet and have a sub 150mbit connection this is also a great choice.
Pros
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Affiliate Link: Ubiquiti NanoBeam AC Gen2 on Amazon