AmpliFi Alien WiFi 6 WiFi System, Seamless Whole Home Wireless Internet Coverage, WiFi Router with Touchscreen Display, 4 Gigabit Ethernet Ports, Ethernet Cable, and MeshPoint

Where to start. I'm an IT professional with a couple decades of experience, so to say I've been around the block a few times supporting computers, networks and servers is an understatement. With that said, I've had a heck of a time in my home residence of 2,600 square feet of finding a wireless solution which worked reliably. When I purchased my house back in 2008, an old Linksys G router covered the whole house with no issues. However, these days there is a lot of network competition in the area and being how I'm located in a court, I have a number of other homes surrounding my residence. I've been through probably eight routers and mesh systems in the last 10 years, trying to keep my home network operating correctly. As I've added additional items, like Echo devices, smart thermostats, Ring cameras, smart outlets, smart lighting and locks, I now have almost 60 devices on my home network. To get everything to work somewhat reliably I had an extender or two around the house. The worst offenders were the Ring cameras (junk) and my iPhone. Earlier this year I purchased a TP-Link AX11000 and centrally located it in the house. Initially things looked promising but that was short lived and I've struggled with disconnects and such since installation. Seeing as I could still return it to Costco, I decided to pull the trigger on the Amplifi Alien Mesh setup. While it's pricey, I figured if it didn't work, I'd just send it back to Amazon. When it arrives and you open the box, you can see the quality. The router and MeshPoint are quite large and extremely well packaged. Everything came across as highly professional and at that point I was hopeful for a positive experience. After installing the app and following the basic instructions, I was able to create my WIFI SSID to match my old router, change the subnet on the local network, provision port forwarding and the DHCP server scope. All very easy through the app. After a firmware update which the app initiated, my home network was up and running. I made a few tweaks here and there to the settings, including accessing the web based interface which allows you to enable/disable several additional options. All told, it was very easy to set up and configure. I placed the main router downstairs and put the MeshPoint upstairs, about 25-30 feet away. The app allows you to select the MeshPoint and you can immediately see your signal strength between both devices which is really nice. It even shows that on the main page of the app but it's a little easier to see when you select the MeshPoint directly. My signal strength was right about dead center in the green, so I left everything where it was. I've now had the setup for about five days and during those five days (with no extenders or any of that old crap I had to use to make things work) I've not had a single issue. This thing has ran like a top. My iPhone which I'd have to switch WIFI on/off several times per day because it would hang has been rock solid. Even my Ring cameras which would never work consistently with my past three setups (Nighthawk Router, Orbi Mesh and AX11000) work fine with the Amplifi Alien. Single strength around my property is quite good as well. The LCD on the router seemed like a gimmick at first, but it's nice that I can walk by and check the status very easily. If the router has issues, it will also tell you via the LCD display. I also like that you can click on your WIFI devices and it gives you an overall percent rating of connectivity. For example, my devices show a combined 87% signal strength and you can scroll through the screen easily to see which devices might have poor connectivity. None of my devices do which is a huge upgrade from the past. I paid full price for this setup and am only writing the review because finding something which worked here has been problematic. I would have preferred to solve the problem with less expense, but if everything continues to work then it's money well spent. I've not had the urge to throw my iPhone through the nearest wall in almost a week! That's a plus! In terms of cons, I'd say the lack of support for dynamic DNS updates is pretty glaring. I pay for NO-IP because my past two routers supported that, but in this product, none of the typical vendors are supported which I found odd. That's really about it IMO besides the price being a bit up there and availability of the kit from Amplifi. It was a bit of an impulse buy when I saw it on Amazon and in-stock, but I'm happy to report the purchase was well worth it. Update March 2022: No issues to report even though I’ve added more wireless devices. Everything continues to work as expected. I’ve applied routine firmware upgrades and that’s it. I have zero regrets. Update November 2025: I ran this system through March of 2025. At that point I replaced it with a more robust Unifi setup with five access points all hardwired at 2.5GBE. The Amplifi Alien served me well, but as more and more network saturation occurred, I started getting some random hiccups with connectivity. I know that some of these can suffer radio failures, but mine ran rock solid and still do when retired. I think the downside to this set up was the fact you couldn't source or add additional mesh points to it without buying another main router. The Unifi hardware and management is so flexible so I'm a little stumped why they made the hardware components fixed and not pairable. Overall, it's still a good setup, but I outgrew it with time.

This modem is beautiful. Very easy to use. Strong, fast connection. I had two technical issues though. I had a Roku 3900CA I purchased a few years back. It is wifi 5 and wouldn’t connect to the Alien router despite all my best efforts. Problem number two is I bought a 50ft cat 6 cable to use as a wired backbone between the router and mesh point. It was unstable. It would randomly stop working and required reboot/fiddling with so I went back to wireless backbone which seems to work fine. I don’t regret the purchase but there were a few issues.

Easy to setup, no issues of drop-offs to date. Very happy!

This replaced an old Apple AirPort Extreme with 3 bridged Express units to extend the reach. Wow!!! What a difference in wifi speed and capacity over a 10 year old system. Incredibly easy to set up. I used the same name for my SSID and password so that I did not have to change 30 (yes, 30 wifi connected) devices. I did not realize I had so many but when you have multiple PCs, phones, tablets, wifi enabled lights, cameras, Amazon echos, Apple TVs, etc, it adds up very quickly. There are several great unboxing and setup videos on the web (google Amplifi Alien) so I won't get into any details about that. I will discuss the app (mostly great but could use a few improvements) and a problem I encountered twice that was resolved. The app is great. As I stated earlier, it told me I had 30 devices in an organized, easy to see, descriptive list. It show the instantaneous traffic data rates for each device. It also includes performance testing between the router and internet (similar to Sppedtest.net) that you can launch from the app and even directly from the touchscreen on the router itself (btw, the touch screen on the router is very cool...much more useful than a blinking light!) The functions on the app are mostly self explanatory. You can pause Internet access to individual devices, groups of devices (they call this a profile) or all of the devices. You can turn on and off the guest access and even turn off the primary wifi password for 2 minutes if you have a group of people that need to access your wifi and you don't want to share the password. The app's main interface shows the router and meshpoint as well as the status of the connection between the two units. If you touch the graphic of the router, it takes you to a menu to change the router settings. Same for the meshpoint. When you are on the meshpoint edit menu, it shows you the signal strength between the meshpoint and the router (mine are wifi connected) and tells you whether the router and meshpoint are too close or too far from each other. That is a great feature. At the top of the app's main screen, it says "Everything is great" (meaning everything is working). But it still said "Everything is great" even though I lost the connection between the router and the meshpoint a couple of times (will discuss this shortly). So the "Everything is great" message should have indicated a problem (hopefully they will add this feature) and pushed a notification to my phone that everything is not great. The app also lets you start a communication with the support team. The app can also send the support team a support log that reports on the activity just before you experienced a problem. I had to do this twice when my meshpoint stopped communicating with the router. When you start the support messaging function from the app, an automated bot called "Bobby" asks you a few questions. Bobby needs more work to be useful. I just asked Bobby to communicate with a person and it moved me to the support queue. I think the issues with my meshpoint had to do with where I placed it. The first time, it was behind a TV. When I moved it from behind the TV and cycled the power, it reconnected. The second time, it was on the floor next to the same TV. It had run for a day without a problem but then disconnected. During the second outage, I unplugged it, waited about a minute and plugged it back in but it did not reconnect. The support person suggested I move the unit closer to the router and try it again. I did and it reconnected immediately. That action of moving the meshpoint closer to the router is something Bobby should recommend rather than just repeating the same questions when you tell it you are having a meshpoint issue. Those are the only issues I had, and using the messaging app with support worked well. Response was under 1 hour and you can reopen the conversation if you have the same problem. One additional point about the meshpoint. It only has lights...no touchscreen. If you turned off the LED using the settings in the app, it is just a dark cylinder (whether it is working or not). When the meshpoint is not working or disconnected, you can easily see the status from the app's main screen. Turning the LED off made it a little confusing to tell what was going on when I tried to power the meshpoint off and on. You can set the meshpoint to night mode where the LED turns off at a defined time if the light from the meshpoint bothers you at night. Another recommendation would be to change the color LED on the meshpoint to red when it is not communicating with the base. As for reach of the wifi signal and wifi performance, both are much better than my old Apple Airport (the difference is extraordinary). BTW, I could have rented wifi equipment from my ISP and bought wifi extenders. I believe owning my own wifi router affords me better privacy. Time will tell if the hardware is reliable but outside of the two issues (that could have been self inflicted) everything is working now. I have had the unit about 1 week. Based on my experience, I would definitely buy this again and would recommend it to friends.

base router reboots multiple times an hour, firmware had been updated and changed nothing. had a second one did the same thing. sent both back. Not the quality id expect from Ubiquiti, a quick seach shows this is a long standing issue with this with no fix other than RMA until your warranty period is over.