The UniFi fanbois were aflutter when Ubiquiti released this video promoting an upcoming UniFi Dream Router:

It sounded like a substantial upgrade to the UniFi Dream Machine: WiFi 6, two ports of PoE, 128GB SSD, an SD slot for storage expansion, and the ability to run Protect and other Ubiquiti controllers that haven’t been available to UDM users due to the lack of storage.

Then it hit the Early Access store for $79. Huh?

Turns out it’s based on MediaTek’s MT7622 platform. Two slow ARM A53 cores vs four fast ARM A57 cores on the UDM. It’s not a Better UDM, it seems more like a move to bring the “UniFi Dream” vision to the entry-level consumer browsing the shelves at Best Buy.

At the software level, like the UDM Pro SE and UXG Pro that still remain trapped in Early Access, the UDR runs on Debian 9 and ditches the mutant Debian unifi-os container. Hopefully that brings a significant reduction in CPU utilization, because my own UDM Pro typically sits at 30-40% just running Talk and Network without IPS/IDS, and I’d expect that to translate to 75-100% on the UDR’s CPU.

Early reports are that the boot process takes upwards of four minutes, LAN to WAN routing is maxing out around 800Mb/s unidirectional and enabling IPS/IDS drops to around 500Mb/s. I don’t think the routing performance is a significant concern for people who’d buy this product at $79 (or $159) but hopefully there’s more optimization that can be achieved because line-rate ought to be table stakes in 2021.

Where I do think Ubiquiti has missed the mark is on the storage and promoting the UDR as running the full suite of UniFi controllers.

SD cards have a well-deserved bad reputation for reliability. These days there are many cards rated for continuous usage in NVRs but the Average Joe is going to buy the cheapest card on the shelves and there’s the longstanding problem of avoiding counterfeit cards.

They could have made the M.2 socket easily accessible for upgrades, though it’s understandable that they wouldn’t. For the target audience, external USB storage would be the best option and the MT7622 does provide a USB 3.0 host.

On the controller front, given the relatively low-performance CPU and 2GB RAM, promoting this device as running every UniFi controller just seems unwise. The Access and Connect markets shouldn’t be bothered by needing a $379 UDM Pro or $199 CloudKey Gen2 Plus, and while Talk on the UDR potentially has an interesting use case as a teleworker gateway, especially with the direction UID appears t be headed, at the moment Talk is a long way from being suitable for that purpose.

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Longer-term, Ubiquiti needs to free these devices from the constraint of being locked to their on-board Network controller. The entry-level buyer whose needs eventually push them to a higher-level “UniFi Dream” router will be left with an attractive piece of e-waste because the onboard AP and switch can’t be adopted to their new UniFi Network controller.