Ubiquiti training is coming to Townsville, and here's the backstory

How great is this: Ubiquiti training is coming to Townsville.

Leader, Ubiquiti’s sole Australian distributor and the provider of official Ubiquiti training, is delivering a full week of in-person training and certification at TecNQ Douglas this September.

📍 TecNQ Douglas, QLD 4814 📅 Monday 21st – Monday 28th September 2026 🕘 9:00am – 5:00pm AEST

Three courses are on offer:

• Routing, Switching & Cybersecurity — 3 days
• Wireless Training — 2 days
• Surveillance & Access Control Training — 1 day

For resellers, MSPs and technical teams working across the Ubiquiti stack, it’s a practical way to build capability across networking, wireless, security and access in one training week, without a flight to Brisbane. Registration is open.

The backstory

Last month I posted on LinkedIn that Leader had tentatively slated Townsville training, provided there was enough local interest. My own interest in the Ubiquiti ecosystem goes back further than that post; I’ve previously written up how a UniFi setup can be run against a routed /29, which is the kind of thing you only bother figuring out if you actually want to see the platform used properly.

I’ll admit I’ve typically been a pfSense/OPNsense person for firewalls, and I’m not walking away from that lightly. But for ease of management, having routing, switching, wireless, security and access control under one unified platform is hard to ignore, and Ubiquiti has been ticking more and more of those boxes with newer features like zone-based firewall rules and BGP routing capability, to name just a couple. That’s a big part of why I’ve been paying attention to this ecosystem, and why training like this matters: the platform is capable enough now that the gap is often the certified skills to run it properly, not the hardware.

That LinkedIn post picked up 9 reactions and around 1,000 impressions, small by internet standards, but it mattered, because it wasn’t just me. Through my own network, I liaised with several other like-minded entities across the region who supported the same idea: get Leader out of the big-cities and into North Queensland. I wasn’t the driver of that effort, and the other individuals involved are staying anonymous in this story, but I certainly backed it, and it’s a genuine example of what can happen when the IT community here decides to pull in the same direction instead of everyone quietly wishing for the same thing on their own.

Leader’s official announcement, and my follow-up post encouraging people to share it.

It’s probably a stretch for me, not being an economist, to claim regional economic impact from one training week. But I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that having training of this calibre delivered in Townsville, at an independent school like TecNQ, is genuinely a big deal. It shows what happens when suppliers and distributors are willing to partner with the regions instead of treating everything north of Brisbane as an afterthought.

If this week goes well, maybe it’s the start of more of it: proper IT and cyber security training delivered locally, without the cost and unreliability of flying Townsville to Brisbane and back. That’s worth backing.

If you’re in Townsville or North Queensland and work with Ubiquiti or UniFi gear, in an MSP, an internal IT team, a school or a business, have a look at the courses and register your spot.