Background

One day, we realized we wanted to do more than what our household TP-Link router could offer at the time. So, we looked online, found the TP-Link Omada suite of products, and decided to order an ER605 V2, which at the time was about a $70 router. We saw the specs and thought it would suit our household best. We got it set up and enjoyed how it functioned. We then ordered a TL-SG2008P switch to replace the Netgear switch we had in place, giving us the opportunity to control all devices under a single webpage. We liked this setup so much we decided to deploy it in Priceville Fire Station 1. Everything was working great without issue.

The Pain of Aging

About one year later, we started to notice issues with our system. Some devices were suddenly going offline for no reason, while others were staying online but running incredibly slow. After some trial and error, we figured out that the Omada switch was the culprit. We looked into other solutions, saw a lot of people using the Ubiquiti UniFi suite of products, and decided to give their USW-Lite-8-POE switch a shot. That switch is the comparable model to the Omada switch we had installed; it did cost a pretty penny, though. As soon as we installed it, the network instantly sped back up and began to work flawlessly again—but only for about 2 months.

The network started to slow down once more. When I ran an internal speed test directly on the Omada router’s interface, I would get the ISP speeds we paid for. However, when I ran a speed test on a device connected by ethernet directly to the router, the speed drop-off was dramatic. The router was failing to pass the traffic through. With that, we swapped our router to the UniFi UCG-Ultra and finally experienced the consistent speeds we were looking for.

Conclusion

In the end, my long-term experience with Omada equipment has not been great. Both Station 1 and Station 3 now have the UCG-Ultra installed and are no longer having issues. However, the remaining Omada APs are starting to throw errors, along with some other older network devices. This goes to show that, in my experience, these Omada devices are deteriorating much quicker than network hardware normally should, which is exactly why I now prefer to install UniFi equipment.