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Ubiquiti EdgeMAX EdgeRouter Lite 3-Port Router (ERLite-3) Review

£999,999.00 excl. VAT

Back to Ubiquiti EdgeMAX EdgeRouter Lite 3-Port Router (ERLite-3)

Review by Jonathan Bromley

Date Added: Sunday 15 June, 2014

Interesting product, so it deserves a careful review.

First, 4Gon\'s reseller service. Good things: easy ordering, price has now come down to a reasonable level

(though it\'s still an excessive premium over the US price), very quick delivery, hassle-free inclusion of UK power cord.

Next, the product itself. Its functionality and features are a perfect fit for my needs (high performance home network in a large-ish house, with about 12 wired Cat6 network ports, two existing Ubiquiti wireless APs, and FTTC internet). Replacement for the low-end router provided by my ISP. The Ubiquiti forum, and various third party reviews, are full of complaints about how tricky the EdgeOS CLI is to use. That\'s really nonsense - the CLI is simple enough for anyone who\'s encountered any embedded-Linux systems before. What\'s difficult about it, for me at any rate, is getting to grips with the world of router terminology. The newest (1.4.1) version of EdgeOS provides some setup wizards that get you to a basic setup quickly, and the GUI makes it easy to apply various settings, BUT that\'s no help if you don\'t know what all the settings actually

mean! It took me more than half a day to get things right, with two rounds of support from the excellent

Ubiquiti community forum site (can\'t praise that highly enough - prompt, helpful, effective responses my

questions). Nevertheless, the Ubiquiti documentation and wiki needs a second pass to make it less nerdy and provide more explanation of the already-available canned \"get started\" configurations. WIthout that explanation, there\'s no way to be self-propelled with getting things working properly. Documentation from

Vyatta at http://ftp.het.net/iso/vyatta/vc6.3/docs is often more useful than the Ubiquiti stuff.

Finally: the thing has now been sitting on my modem shelf for 48 hours, doing its work flawlessly. I have yet to see the hoped-for performance improvements, because I had to change the BT modem at the same time,

and the modem still hasn\'t properly settled down after a BT-pushed firmware upgrade - no fault of the router, obviously. And I\'m already reaping the benefits of massively improved control over the DHCP server and NAT port mapping compared with the setup I had before.

The product is not for the faint-hearted, but seems to do its job well at a great-value

price point. Documentation is only for those with propeller-equipped heads, but the forum site does a great rescue job.

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