Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Our NEW NEW Office WiFi – Alta Labs AP6 Pro”.
Hi welcome to Short Circuit, I’m really excited for today, because we’re solving a problem that we’ve had for about 1 day. We don’t have Internet in our lovely office. That is definitely not the old Langley house, but ala Labs is hopefully here to save the day. This is a switch and AP and networking ecosystem that I have not had the pleasure of experiencing yet and I’m really stoked to be doing it in this exact environment. Belle’S, here with me to fact check we’re staying 5p to fart.
Don’T worry, we’re going to start with the switch the S2 for Poe we’ve got the accessory pack here. What do we got in here? Propaganda, Community Forum, technical support, oops, sorry, there’s stuff in there the elater did you pee? Is that why it’s warmer uh? Don’T don’t think about it? Okay, oh they come with rack studs, that’s so cool power, cable! Only one which makes me think that this is not going to have redundant power supplies, not my preferred, but here we are, and then we’ve got the little rack here that we’re going to have to put on the switch in a minute. Oh, we’ve got some free, floaties, wonderful, oh nice, nice foam! Oh that went right on my laptop okay. This is the s24 poe. It’S a 24 plus two Port switch here, 16 of them. You can see in the Box here can do Poe, plus power and the other eight are just normal gigabit and then on this side we have two SFP plus ports, so those in theory based on it being sfb plus, should do 10 gig, although it doesn’t say I’M just hoping that is the case around back.
We have two fans and a single power supply. I would have really liked to see two power supplies here. If I’m being honest, I don’t know what the price point is, but I imagine it’s reasonable and that’s probably why I do like they have discreete uh LEDs for the poe power, which is nice, and I think that’s pretty much it for here you can screw on The rack ears on the side, but let’s look at the Wi-Fi: that’s what people want hey look at that ap6 professional! It’S a 4×4 dualband Enterprise wireless access point. So it’s not going to be doing Wi-Fi 6E with 6 gz, but it will do 2.4 and 5G on 4×4, which is nice wow, it’s a cool, it’s a nice form factor. I will say I imagine this is an LED here we got a little.
That must be their logo yeah, it’s their logo. On the back heat sinking, a oh, this reset button, good job ala Labs. It’S on the back of an access point nobody’s going to accidentally like push it. We’Ve got the poe plus input, which is a 1 gig R j45. What else is in here, propaganda, uh, plastic, mounting bracket screws, oh and little Feats, if you want to put it on your desk, that’s a good good inclusion.
Oh nice, a bracket for installing on drop ceiling, t- bars, it’s got the little ears, so you would click it on and then screw in the presumably the blast, the plastic bracket. So it’s ip54, which means I should be able to do this. No we’ve got two. I wouldn’t go all the way way, I think the 54.
What does 54 mean you remember? What ip54 is like splashes indirectly ip54 is pretty good. I just dipped the tip that should be fine right, yeah, yeah, tip dip tip dip. Here I could try this tip too or I’ll tip dip, this tip too. What are you trying to do? Is this like a ubiquity competitor or something yeah, but we need internet at the house right so that light you’re welcome, yeah, brilliant. How does this work? Ah? Wait what the hell! How does this go? Oh, oh uh, so it just clicks in I. This would be a lot easier to do if it was on a wall cuz.
You would just like tilt the end in and then slide it. I imagine there’s two little like spring-loaded tabs on the side. Well, that screw’s gone forever.
It’S really really springy sprongs. Oh there we go and then you said wiggle it back and forth. Oh yeah that come came out pretty easily you’d.
Imagine it would be on a ceiling and you would just stick the screwdriver in there that would pop that side out and then you just do it a wiggle yeah. That’S that’s pretty easy. I like that you don’t need a special tool and uh. This is just another one of those.
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I mean uh our internet. Great, let’s see if the Wi-Fi works got these great ubiquity ether that cables there’s one see: do we get any lights? Hey blue! I downloaded their app and got signed in oh yeah. Look at that right there! So yeah! I see them on my phone already, which is cool, wait. Oh, they even show on my laptop sick.
I just am on the Ala Labs website connected to the neighbor’s Wi-Fi and it’s working just fine. So here let me go set up, looks like they both have for more updates. Unfortunately, damn that was uh. That was fast connect it. I want the most Wi-Fi five we’ll do 160 wide. Why not? It’S not letting me pick DFS channels, which is a little strange. Look at that. Oh that’s cute! It’S even got like a traffic graph.
Let me add a Wi-Fi network that we can connect to here. Neighbors Wi-Fi that seems appropriate. Add password! Oh oh yeah! I forgot you can do that uh. It was one of the big features that they announced when Alta laps kind of came to Market.
With these new APS uh, you can have multiple passwords and Define different settings based on that password. You can do this on ubiquity access points now too, but you could have like one Wi-Fi network and you have a password for you and your partner and then you have a password for your kids and you want to have no download cap where you set them. A cap where you can set a schedule, so they only get Wi-Fi at certain times or uh. You can make it so you bypass the like adult filtering and they don’t blocked applications. What can I add? Ooh? Look at all these applications.
Oh there’s! No search! Here. That’S a little lame. Let’S try that Tik Tok yeah, no Tik Tok in this house, I’m going to update these and then let’s try them out.
You know. Curiously, actually I don’t see the switch. It’S not detecting the switch. I don’t know if the switches work on their dashboard.
Maybe it’s just a dumb switch wow. They actually updated feels like in seconds. I mean we cut the camera for a few minutes there, but I wasn’t really paying attention and they’re already done. Oh yeah, look at that wow, the traffic, it’s already there. It’S very responsive. I like that and it’s cool, because this isn’t like a cloud key with ubiquity or like a paid online service. This is just what you get by default. You can have full management of your devices on their Cloud uh without having to pay for anything or pay for a subscription, which is pretty cool for like normies um.
It would be nice to have the option to self-host the controller and I imagine they’re, probably working on that. I can see my device here. Look I got an IP address.
We can see. Our negotiated rates are around 1,300 Meg. Let’S run a speed test.
I think the neighbors only have one gig up and down so that’s the best we’re going to get here probably should uh here. Let me let me let me optimize this a little more here. Look at how optimized my Wi-Fi! I don’t know if these channels are already in use, though, so let me check that really quick.
Let’S try the scan feature and it will tell us scan quick scan shouldn’t interrupt your Wi-Fi network, that’s cool, oh wow! That was look how fast that was. It’S already done, it looks like I should use. I need 160 wides, so I need quite a few. Are the only 160 wides we got okay, so I could do like 112. Let’S try that WiFi channel there we go yeah.
The DFS Channel channels are working now too, so maybe that’s just an app thing or because they were out of date, I’m not sure and then for AP1. Let me just disable AP1. Oh look at that. You pick the channel and you just hit disable so easy. I love you ubiquity, but the amount of times I’ve asked for just. Let me turn off the goddamn radio on an AP without having to screw around with like AP groups. That was so easy and that’s how easy it should be.
We do have it up on the 160 wide now let me connect and then we’ll do a proper speed test and see how fast she goes. It’S not Wi-Fi 6C, so we’re probably not going to see beyond gigabit speeds, and we only have a 1 gig uh neighbor connection here, but it should still be pretty quick looks like about 560 down getting pretty close to 700 up. If you had faster internet and um, maybe not other people using it, sorry neighbors it’d probably be faster, but that’s pretty good.
Try it on my phone. I guess it looks pretty similar 450 down 360 up, not not the best ever, but also not ideal circumstances whatsoever. Something I realized I missed earlier on. The front of these switches is the reset button, but it’s not recessed. Now I liked it on the access point right there, because it would be hard to accidentally press this. It’S on the back.
You can’t even get to it. If you wanted to here when you’re fumbling around in the rack trying to plug in a cable, I could see you accidentally pressing this. That being said, you probably have to hold it for some amount of time uh. So it’s probably a nonissue but seems a little bit sketch hey.
Look at that. Actually, the switch is picking up now here. Let’S click set up appears to have been factory reset. Do you want to set up this device again? Yes is currently assigned to another user’s account. This can happen if the previous owner of this device has not deleted this device from their account. Do you want to request permission to use this device? Oh okay, yeah.
I guess it’s software drmed with their Cloud hosting, even though I reset it. I don’t know how I feel about that. I mean it’s good from the perspective of it getting stolen and not being able to reuse, but also, if you were to sell one of these and not reset it from your account. That would be not great.
They tested it in the lab and that’s why it was adopted to somebody’s account. They reset it and now we are in. It also has a software update, but this time I’m going to roll, because I want to know how fast it updates. So there we go update click, let’s see, oh there’s a little, no way, there’s no way it was that fast update, 100 % complete.
It says, bullsh I’ll refresh. Let’S see, no, it still says 100 % complete. I don’t know about this. Chief.
The update status went away. Oh, I think it’s rebooting. Now that’s pretty fast. Let’S see how fast it reboots, though yeah I don’t have internet anymore.
That makes sense internet gone. No, I have to connect to the neighbor’s Wi-Fi now the signal sucks. Okay, I’m doing stuff. Now Blinky blink, hey there, we go okay, a couple minutes pretty pretty fast, pretty respectable.
Let’S take a look at what the switch features are really quick: okay, open it up there. I see the ports in a very condensed manner, power cycle, the poe, that’s good. I can click on individual ports.
I can set the native VLAN the tagged allowed, vlans Poe, speed, isolation, a download upload limit, a voice, VLAN Loop detection, storm control, Mac control seems like most of the things here. Oh, it even has 802.1x uh, so you can do network access control, that’s pretty cool. I can mirror ports combine them. I don’t know what this color stuff is. What does this even mean? Colors are a way to group specific APS together. Aps will only broadcast these Wi-Fi networks that match their configured colors both APS and Wi-Fi networks can be part of multiple colors and groups.
Okay, so that’s basically AP groups, that’s what the colors mean. They probably should have just called it groups and given the groups colors rather than calling them colors, but here we are, I can set vlans. I can select all it’s it’s pretty much. What you would expect it feels very new like this is software has existed? For I don’t know, you know a year and they’ve got all the features in there, but maybe the layout and whatever isn’t the most optimal yet, but it seemingly Works link lights, hey you can turn them off. Let’S try it hey! Look at that! The link lights are off.
That’S a good feature, LED white red oo. I can change the color. Let’S go green, eh, ah green. I wish it had a screen, but the green is cool too. So overall I mean I’m pretty stoked that there’s another competitor in this kind of price point and space for small businesses and kind of like Enthusiast at home, where you want more control over your stuff. I look forward to when there’s a local self-, hostable controller.
I know that that’s in beta right now, but we’ll have to see how that goes. Don’T really like that. It was DRM to another account as physical Hardware really wish. That wasn’t a thing.
Maybe the local controller will make that not a problem, but overall it cool. It’S a very responsive, dashboard that much I like like look at this. This is like a live feed of.
What’S going on like the ibiquity, one is pretty responsive, but this is this might be another League, especially considering it’s currently cloud-based. It’S pretty impressive. If you like, this video, like it, get subscribed um April fools by the way, we’re not actually moving into the house we’re not actually doing short circuit from a cold cold tub. Thank gosh .