Curious about Ruckus or other "enterprise" access points

bleomycin

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 14, 2010
Messages
242
Hi Everyone,

I'm trying to find a wireless solution for my house that actually works. To get proper 5GHz coverage for most of the house and front/back yards I need 4+ AP's and have been using unifi UAP-AC's since their release a while ago. I can't say i've been very happy with them (middling performance, crashes, RMA's, device incompatibility etc.).

I'm very curious about moving to something like the ruckus R700 or R710, i've heard mostly good things about beamflex+, and the R710 has MU-MIMO. My question is, do I have to pay for some type of support contract just to get firmware upgrades for these devices once I buy them? I'm not excited about their purchase price but i'm willing to pay it to finally get something that works well, however i'm not willing to pay a shitton annually for a support contract just to receive firmware updates for personal use. Thanks for any help or insight!
 
Most of your issues are probably due to the fact that 11ac is still on 1 gen hw...
//Danne
 
Have you considered adding amps and/or bigger antennas? That's all I needed to do to get better coverage.
 
I stick with Cisco. Demo'd rukkus and implemented it on one site, it was pure shit. The funny thing was rukkus vendor did the install. Hp works alright, but if you can afford it go with a 2702i from Cisco
 
Thanks for the replies guys. Can any of you provide ballpark pricing for the required licensing i'm going to need to run any of your recommendations? I really don't feel like dealing with emailing/calling a bunch of sales people from different wifi companies (that probably don't want to talk to a home user anyways) for the 3-4 access points I need for my home just to find out the pricing is astronomical.
 
Most of your issues are probably due to the fact that 11ac is still on 1 gen hw...
//Danne

The R710 he mentions is Gen2, FYI. I have one hanging from the ceiling in the new office I am renovating, but haven't had a chance to fire it up and play with it yet. I haven't seen any Gen 2 client adapters yet, though.

A service contract is required for firmware updates for Ruckus equipment. I can get you pricing if you want.

I am a new Ruckus partner, and have only installed one client (25 R500 APs) so far, but I really like the controller and AP performance compared to the Cisco equipment I have supported in the past. I would call it severe overkill for a home install and you lose lots of features without a controller, but it should be rock-solid.

I use UBNT on smaller/lighter jobs and really like it for the price, but haven't used or heard good things about the AC gear, so maybe you are just a victim of a poor product release.

Edit: You beat me to the reply. I will send you a PM
 
I'm not all that happy with my r7000 ether & have been looking myself for the past week.
Everything I'm reading points to Aruba being the best right now... tho I can't find solid 'review' on it.
I wanted Cisco (I get ~30%+ off msrp, dunno if that's a good deal, but better than nothing) till I saw this:
http://community.arubanetworks.com/t5/Technology-Blog/New-Cisco-802-11ac-3800/ba-p/113459
I'm just going to wait until Cisco has something descent and live with the disconnects/dropouts of the r7000. Aruba 'seems' too expensive imho http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/802.11ac-access-points,2-722-2.html
 
I'm not all that happy with my r7000 ether & have been looking myself for the past week.
Everything I'm reading points to Aruba being the best right now... tho I can't find solid 'review' on it.
I wanted Cisco (I get ~30%+ off msrp, dunno if that's a good deal, but better than nothing) till I saw this:
http://community.arubanetworks.com/t5/Technology-Blog/New-Cisco-802-11ac-3800/ba-p/113459
I'm just going to wait until Cisco has something descent and live with the disconnects/dropouts of the r7000. Aruba 'seems' too expensive imho http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/802.11ac-access-points,2-722-2.html

Thanks, yeah i've been looking into aruba most of today as well. It does seem on paper if i'm understanding things correctly that their "instant" line of access points could be the way to go, like a IAP-205 or IAP-225? They seem to offer client steering (which they call client match), band steering, as well as free centralized management without the need for an additional hardware controller or paid cloud controller.

I believe the firmware updates are free as well, however i'm not 100% sure. I do know that the updates are locked behind a client portal but i've heard you don't need a paid contract to have access to that? I'm still not sure...

The 5GHz range on these UAP-AC's is just atrocious, my iphone 6 plus sitting on my desk about 15ft from the AP mounted on the ceiling in the hallway has extremely poor signal and iperf tests out at ~34Mbit/s. When I switch out to an apple airport extreme in the same location performance jumps to 160-180Mbit/s. The UAP only has similar levels of performance when i stand directly under it.
 
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The ones that are being talked about in that post are actually the first generation 3702's. We actually got two of those first gens, and they work fine. We recently did a conference with 400 people in one big room that had two of these and had no issues. Don't believe everything you read, ESPECIALLY if it's from a competitor. I don't even believe cisco when they start trying to talk shit about other vendors.
 
Hmm no clue, I haven't had any issues with them. Now the 3702s don't even come with that add on, it's all one unit. The only complaint I've had is the weight I'd the ap is uneven, so they hang lop sided, you would think with all of that r&d money Cisco would disperse the weight evenly
 
I used to work for an Aruba VAR and I can tell you that the IAP line is pretty badass. When you deploy multiples, they elect one of their number as the master who manages roaming and such for the rest. Stable and easy, but unfortunately not cheap. Given a home environment, they might be a bit spendy.
 
We have had great results with Ruckus system we deployed in a multi site business environment.
You do need service agreement to get access to updates etc.
 
Having used Cisco, Aruba, ruckus and Motorola in enterprise environments I would have to say ruckus and Cisco are the best "enterprise solution".

That being said, I love my open-mesh network at home. I've got 5x AP's, which I just upgraded to the dual-band om5p-an. Seamless roaming works great, 802.3af makes powering easy with standard switches or midspans (vs others like ubiquiti). I really like the newer interface (Cloudtrax4) of the cloud management. It allows for 4 SSID's which can also use vlan tagging, bandwidth management, network isolation, splash pages, etc independent of each other.

They even just came out with an AC1750 model.

The biggest thing I like about open-mesh: no on-site controller to deal with, but you still get all the benefits of having one on site.

Edit:
All of my open-mesh gear has Ethernet links, I don't use them as repeaters. The way open-mesh designed their system they can use Ethernet to pass mesh traffic so seamless roaming still works.
 
Thanks for the suggestions everyone I appreciate it. Open mesh looks very interesting, I had no idea they existed, they may have been worth giving a try. I was able to get a very good deal on 4 Aruba IAP-225's. The fact they supported all of the features I wanted without the need for a controller or paid license made them very appealing.

I've spent most of today tinkering with them, I'm still trying to wrap my head around their client match functionality, more specifically the various settings it has for determining when to move a client from one AP to another (CM calculating interval, CM neighbor matching % and CM threshold are all voodoo to me right now), the documentation is very lacking in this particular area imo. Other than that good first impressions.
 
The Aruba 220 series are great APs. Your lucky to find a deal on them.

Just as a FYI, Aruba got bought out by HP back in march. I hope HP does not bugger things up.

Also, If you don't buy the product from an "Approved Aruba Partner", Aruba will give you a run around when it comes to support/warrantees (Learned that the hard way).
 
The Aruba 220 series are great APs. Your lucky to find a deal on them.

Just as a FYI, Aruba got bought out by HP back in march. I hope HP does not bugger things up.

Also, If you don't buy the product from an "Approved Aruba Partner", Aruba will give you a run around when it comes to support/warrantees (Learned that the hard way).

Yeah, I figured warranty support would be an issue but i'm not overly worried about that. That's extremely unfortunate to hear about the HP buyout, that's almost guaranteed to ruin everything at some point. Hopefully there will still be a decent option for those like me who want some of the fancy enterprise-y features but don't want to pay for licensing when its time for the next upgrade...
 
That's extremely unfortunate to hear about the HP buyout, that's almost guaranteed to ruin everything at some point.

Depends on what route HP goes.. If they go for "home use" then Aruba will crash and burn, but if treated Aruba as "corporate" then they do provide descent product, at a cost. long term, I am worried about Aruba.
 
I picked up a cisco 3602i + 802.11ac module off ebay ($250 total) ended up not liking my HP PoE switch because it didn't support the needed CDP commands to increase power (benchmarked at 20mbit). AP doesn't support LLDP in autonomous mode. Bought a cisco PoE injector ($35 local) all radios up, come to find out 802.11ac doesn't work without a controller even tho it shows as 'UP' (cisco 2504 is going for $400 on ebay), so ends up non AC but benchmarked it at just over 100mbit so it's good enough.
 
I picked up a cisco 3602i + 802.11ac module off ebay ($250 total) ended up not liking my HP PoE switch because it didn't support the needed CDP commands to increase power (benchmarked at 20mbit). AP doesn't support LLDP in autonomous mode. Bought a cisco PoE injector ($35 local) all radios up, come to find out 802.11ac doesn't work without a controller even tho it shows as 'UP' (cisco 2504 is going for $400 on ebay), so ends up non AC but benchmarked it at just over 100mbit so it's good enough.

That's why you use the virtual WLC ;)
 
The 3602i + module is a weird AP. They deployed those before AC was even finalized, so you could add the AC addon after the fact. We have a few of them and the 3702i's are MUCH better.
 
I'm pretty much in the same boat. I have a few 3602i with the AC module that I'm going to connect to my 3650, but I'm really looking into the 3702i now. I'm probably going to sell of my all of my APs and modules to get a couple of 3702s
 
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