Ubiquiti, a $33 billion tech empire, is led by Robert Pera, owner of the Memphis Grizzlies. He pledged to tighten controls on his products years ago — so why are Russian military units sending Ubiquiti vendors thank-you notes?
Oh look, a hit piece put out by a media company that’s owned by a capital investment group that is shorting UIs stock…I wonder what this could be about?!
Ubiquiti may not be blameless but this article is ridiculous.
Ubi isn’t selling this stuff to the Russians and neither are their vendors. Their vendors, most of them in the article are from overseas, are selling them to middle-men who sell them to another middle-man who then physically gets the equipment into Russian hands where it potentially goes through ANOTHER middle man before its used by Russian troops. There’s almost no way to control that and if you read carefully the “legal experts” quoted toward the bottom of the article use some very careful language in order to not tell you this.
You can’t just “shut it down” either, although even the article notes that Ubi is trying. Most of the gear that’s getting into Russian military hands for use in the war is stuff that you have probably never used. It’s PowerBeam and NanoBeam product that’s most often used by WISPs, which makes sense because that’s precisely how Russian forces are using it. What the article isn’t telling you is that this stuff does NOT need hooked to the Cloud in order to function. In fact it doesn’t need Internet access at all and so there’s no way for Ubi to know where it’s being used or even that it’s been powered up!
Even if Ubi can tell that the equipment is powered on and in use they may not know where it’s at with sufficient accuracy or knowledge to do anything about it. The damn thing could be on the Internet via Starlink sitting in Pokrovsk. On December 1st, 2025 was a SL system with Ubi gear attached to it in Pokrovsk being operated by Russia or Ukraine? There’s literally no way for Ubi or anyone else to know.
As for Ubi doing more if you read the whole article you’ll find that more than a few of these bad distributors HAVE been caught and shut down across the globe which almost certainly means that Ubi is helping at some level.
In short the article looks bad but when you start breaking down the individual points it quickly falls apart, especially when the media company behind it has a monetary interest in sinking Ubiquiti’s stock.
There’s almost no way to control that
That’s not really true. If they wanted to, they could massively decrease the level of shipments that reach the russians. It’s not a priority for Ubiquiti.
It’s like with money laundering, it’s very difficult to control (I am talking in a general sense). Yet you’ll find that enabling money laundering for drug cartels is treated relatively seriously by major western financial institutions.
If they wanted to, they could massively decrease the level of shipments that reach the russians.
I’m curious on how?
Here is a high-level discussion:
https://piefed.social/comment/9903594
But going beyond that, forgot about Ukraine for a second.
Let’s say you are a competitor of Ubiquiti and you want to develop a bonus structure for your regional teams. You want to know the return on your marketing spend, how well the regional sales teams are developing relationships with retailers, B2B and other source of revenues.
To do that you need to know your real market share. You know your own numbers, but if share is a component of your bonus structure, you need to have accurate numbers for your competition (your sales going up by 15% is a massive failure if the rest of the regional market truly grew by 30%, it means your teams are failing).
To do that, you have several source of data. Roughly speaking you have two basic measures ([1], [2]):
- [1] Shipments into a region/channel. Units that were sent to a geography (not sales, just shipments)
- [2] POS transactions (syndicated providers offer this albeit it’s less comprehensive on a global geography basis than [1])
- [3] You’re going to always have a delta between the two measures ([1], [2]) above, because you have things like B2B sales, government sales, shipments into the regional distributor channel and so on. These numbers are also available on a regional basis from market data providers.
That being said, you have situations where ([1] - [2]) clearly does not equal anything close to even the highest estimates of [3]. That’s when you know shipments into a region are actually being diverted into another country (other countries?).
If the difference between ([1] - [2]) and [3] for your competitor is huge, you want adjust this in your regional market share calculations and bonus payouts. Because otherwise your regional team might be busting ass like no tomorrow and their performance is being undercounted because your competitor is not actually selling a large part of [1] in the given region, the units are going elsewhere.
Believe it or not, this can be a very sensitive topic. People tend to get very pissed off if their bonuses are impacted (especially if they work hard to grow their regional business).
And that’s if you don’t have access to Ubiquiti datasets; our thought experiment positions us as a company that is trying understand shipment to POS/sales transactions for our competitor; Ubiquiti.
If you are Ubiquiti, I assume (this was true in tech product segments where I have worked) you also have the benefit of being able to track geographic activation of your products (I am assuming it’s possible to update Ubiquiti devices?) and potentially their serial numbers; so you can track which shipments are being diverted to which geography. With some more work and tracking, you can figure out what’s going.
There are some other approaches to triangulation that are used that I am not going to cover here (assuming you are a competitor of Ubiquiti).
Do you see why I said what I did?
I’m curious on what your solution to the Nvidia problem is? Just stop selling to the market whose sales increased? Then the next, and the next?
Knowing where the hardware is getting in from isn’t a solution. How do they know which orders are legit, and which are meant to go to the restricted area?
And it’s already been pointed out that the Ubiquiti hardware in question requires no activation at all. In fact I don’t believe any Ubiquiti hardware inherently needs internet, never mind activation.
Some features may, but that’s different than requiring activation for the device to work.
I’m curious on what your solution to the Nvidia problem is? Just stop selling to the market whose sales increased? Then the next, and the next?
For one, you need to understand whether Nvidia is acting in good faith or not. If they are not, then one needs to create legal incentives for them to start acting in good faith.
A basic evaluation of sales dynamics is done irrespective of sanctions (remember how the example I described was tied to defining a functional bonus system). Nvidia has an understanding of their sales flow into Singapore. If you have a long standing partner that sees an increase in shipments that aligns with internal demand forecast (which are developed anyways), there is no red flag.
If you suddenly have an unknown entity placing orders larger than the total sales in Singapore for the last quarter. That is a clear red flag. You need to ask them who their end-customers are and whether they have validated that their own end-customers aren’t working on sanction workarounds. If they don’t cooperate, then you blacklist the entity and owners and don’t send them any more shipments.
If Nvidia (or a suspicious new distributor) isn’t doing, then they are acting in bad faith.
And it’s already been pointed out that the Ubiquiti hardware in question requires no activation at all. In fact I don’t believe any Ubiquiti hardware inherently needs internet, never mind activation.
That’s why my example referred to a competitor of Ubiquiti (i.e. you don’t actually need activation data to run the calculations as described in my reply to you).
What outlined is just one tool in a toolkit that is regularly used outside of any sanction compliance.
Sales (especially for high-margin high tech items) isn’t done an intuition basis since as far back as the 60s/70s. With modern tech you can very much track your sales flow and identify suspicious sources that are almost certainly working on sanctions work around.
It’s all a matter of motivation (and lack of incentives).
I curious, do you have any information to suggest Ubiquiti has been acting in good faith?
That’s… difficult in practice. Especially since the people involved in trying to circumvent sanctions and get this sort of shit to the Russians don’t just order things directly. In the interest of confusing and delaying legal repercussions for anyone involved, there tends to be lots of misdirection. To your point around money laundering: you’re kidding yourself if you think that sort of thing has been completely quashed.
I understand. Nor am I naive enough to think it’s even possible to completely address money laundering or sanction workarounds.
It’s almost certain they have a lackadaisical (if not out right malicious) approach to limiting shipments that end up in russia. I am genuinely curious, is there a reason to believe otherwise?
It’s almost certain…
Show your work
That’s a fair question.
Look at say Nvidia and import controls of enterprise GPUs into China. A highly politically and PR sensitive topic. Something that is arguably a bigger deal (for Nvidia) than breaking sanctions/restrictions on russia.
And yet it turned out that Nvidia had knowledge that around the same time that export restrictions on China were implemented (with their “topline” China shipment numbers declining), there was a massive increase in shipments to Singapore (a trade focused polity with a long history a ethnic-Chinese presence in local business communities).
Did Nvidia act upon this or did just decided to assume that “goly gee, it just so happened that our Singapore shipments started massively increase at exactly the same time we had implement export restrictions into China”.
The people behind Nvidia might be cruel, corrupt and regressive, but they are not stupid.
And I have no reason to believe Ubiquiti is any better from a moral perspective.
EDIT: More details from a similar question to yours (but much more polite): https://piefed.social/comment/9904032
And even if they did shut it down remotely, that could be construed as an unauthorized act of war.
Ubiquiti makes fucking trash.
I bought one of their more expensive switches recently, and you can’t mirror more than one port to another port. Also, only half the ports can be mirrored.
They are expensive toys for people who want EZ (basic) networking setups.
Do their switches still stop forwarding traffic when you make changes for 10-30 seconds?
Is this why there’s never stock? It’s going to Russia?
I read the same about the OPi 5+. Apparently it used the Rockchip RK3588 which has a decent NPU for self controlled drones, so russia bought most of the stock. Their price went from ~150$ to infinite in a month.
Nah, according to the article this is mostly the WISP type stuff, particularly the Power and Nano beam products meant for Long Range Point to Point / Multi Point connections. This isn’t routers / switches / etc.
yeah are there any big tech companies that aren’t full of authoritarian shit bags?
I’ve not heard bad things about Mikrotik yet.
Increasingly, seems like no. :(
Line go up.
Actually, TFA is specifically intended to make line go down enough that the authors make a pile of cash.
Unfortunately almost nobody cares about what UI and others are doing.
What the fuck
Interesting if true…
Please no….
here before .ml
