Small businesses? Sure. I've seen Unifi networks with a few hundred MACs often enough.
Enterprises? Thousands, tens of thousands of employees? Generally cost isn't prohibitive at the scale so bigger ecosystems with more support make way more sense. Even their enterprise switches aren't really equivalent to Cisco, Arista, Juniper, etc enterprise offerings. They're inching forward, though.
What kinda of small businesses? My friend does consulting and most of his business is on small (100-250 employees) size and sometimes small start up, typically in the office construction phase where he comes in and set up network infrastructure. He never seems anyone asking for UniFi, but again, might just because the cost? He feels UniFi is price competitive at that scale but no one wants it for some reason.
When he was with a larger company, cisco and juniper were the only options.
Upmarket electrical trade, engineering offices, MSPs commonly, smallish healthcare, an equine event center, a bank.
I see tons of small businesses (mom & pop, restaurants) with a UI AP or two, of course, but that's not what you meant, I don't think.
The places that COULD use UI often just don't care, and want the cheap toilet paper (netgear, ebay whatever) since cost discipline can be critical. I think there's a niche of biz with enough margin that networking/cameras get sold together and they don't insist on lowest price. My guess would also be the MSP that is quoting the job also heavily influences whether UI is used, plenty of dinosaurs out there.
Bigger places want routing, network virtualization, etc from the big players you mentioned. UI doesn't want to mess with BGP, spine-leaf, sd access/wan, etc. There's also like the 24/7 support options they want, and access to the partner/VAR/contractor networks so you have tons of options. The sales deals and dinners unfortunately factor into this too...
Thank you! He recently did a job on a newly constructed venue hall for about 300-400 people. He originally quoted full UI which has everything the company is looking for, from network to security camera. The company didn't want that, I think he ended do a combination of Cisco and some odd security system.
you're more polite than me, but that's essentially the same response as what i have to people citing chatGPT. i just say "ChatGPT told me that's wrong".
if somebody thinks that unverified LLM output is relevant to a conversation, i don't want to have to defend why it shouldn't be part of the conversion, i want to put the responsibility for justifying it back onto them.
Right, consumers with LLMs vs sellers using algorithmic pricing (“revenue management” at hotels or landlord rental pricing) is hardly a fair fight. Supermarkets want to get in on the action, too.
I think it is actually a pretty fair fight - LLM gives consumer baseline understanding of what the price should be. Coordination schemes, even if semi-legal for a temporary period as the laws adjust, will ultimately lose to defectors.
Billions of dollars are being burned to keep taxis for burritos alive, along with any restaurants that fight it. For better or worse, it's hard to bet against human nature when we're offering making something easier.
Of course, cost pressures are insane on delivery drivers, delivery middlemen to make money, and restaurants to cut COGS. It's probably no accident there's videos like [1] about how every restaurant tastes the same when supplied by Sysco (national distributor versus buying fresh/local, which means higher prices...)
IMO, delivery is also killing peoples' finances [2]. I know multiple people who not well-off but effectively no longer cook and only eat premade delivered food. The lack of impulse control turns them into whales not for a gacha game, but for DoorDash.
> It's probably no accident there's videos like [1] about how every restaurant tastes the same when supplied by Sysco (national distributor versus buying fresh/local, which means higher prices...)
Sysco is a secondary problem. Restaurants are so relentlessly focused on avoiding wastage that even if they prep their food, they coalesce around the exact, same cheap ingredients in a relatively small number of dishes.
For example, every single restaurant in Austin, TX used to have chicken-fried steak on the menu--to the extent that I used to joke about restaurants that you absolutely wouldn't expect to have it (the Chinese place that I knew served it eons ago made an excellent one).
Now, presumably because beef is expensive, chicken-fried steak is a relative rarity in Austin. And, even if you can find it, it's likely to be sub-par.
Sandwich shops are slightly different but prices are driving the quality decline here, too. The problem is that their primary meat ingredients mostly suck because they are getting the lowest tiers.
It's secondary but I maintain it's related because from what I know from talking to local restaurants, as delivery grows, margins shrink, and it's a different animal catering to floods of online orders. One option is to go cheaper to grow that revenue especially if you're not full with dine-in guests.
It's primarily a trap when a restaurant doesn't command value relative to others in that segment, and their dishes are basically commodities (sure, food in general doesn't have great margins, but compare steakhouse vs fast food).
Chopped lettuce or sliced tomatoes from Sysco/distributor is one thing for sandwiches but maybe not salads, and then there's giving in and having entire dishes replaced from their catalog: pancake mix, gravy, premade frozen entrees, desserts. Enter the death spiral as floundering restaurants raises prices and cut quality, discourage customers, raise prices and cut more, losing more customers, etc.
FWIW regarding chicken-fried steak, I live in an area of people with "chicken nugget" palates and lots of diners. Most of the chicken-fried steak now is pre-breaded with canned gravy that is probably Sysco or Chef Store - I know I see the gallon cans walking through the aisles when I go. Yet, there's two local joints that still hand-bread and differentiate with home-made gravies, one spicy, one with herbs. Dinner-plate size dishes to boot which we split. They've resisted delivery and focus on dining in, but...mains start at $22 or so.
It's representative of the split between cheap vs quality. The chicken-fried delivery anecdotes might be a proxy for the class divide, too, hmm.
You're right that it doesn't make sense. It suggests a failure in data handling (who can I share this with?).
A lot of these are borrowed from the US .gov in which prosecution is a relatively effective way to get compliance with these policies, but, and I'll take some license here, are copied to appear sophisticated by unsophisticated players outside of that.
Have you looked at Mikrotik? They offer a more traditional autonomous OS w/o controllers and both a nice CLI and a powerful GUI tool.
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