New house with Ruckus installed

[Phaethar]

Hey guys,

We're going to be purchasing a new home in March, and part of what it (and a lot of new homes apparently) includes is a pre-wired Ruckus WiFi setup. I've never used it, or even heard of it before this, so I'm wondering how best to integrate what I have with what the new home will have.

First, the new home is a 2-story home. The basement will not be finished on day 1, but will be done shortly after we move in. It looks like they are putting a cabinet in the basement with the Ruckus control unit and are running Cat 5E to a handful of rooms throughout the house. There appear to be R320 Unleashed series access points on the main level and upper levels. The control unit is a ICX 7150-C12P. From the little bit I see in the basement, they expect you to put a modem and router down there and connect it to the Ruckus and go from there.

I'm currently using Asus routers. I upgraded to a pair of AX routers a little over a year ago, and so I have a GT-AX11000 as my main router, with a RT-AX88U hard wired in the basement as an access point. That also gets me a good number of gig ports, as they are near TVs and game consoles, so I have those wired in instead of wireless. I also run a media server off of my PC, and have it plugged into the AX11000 using a 2.5GB port. That router then has a switch connected to it that is using 2 bonded ports for a 2GB uplink, which seems to help when I'm streaming 4K movies from the hard wired Apple TV.

So all of that said... what's my best route to integrate what I have with the Ruckus setup at the new house? The Ruckus equipment is not WiFI 6 from what I'm seeing. We have a couple iPhones that would be impacted by that, as well as a laptop.

For what it's worth, internet will be Comcast gigabit at first. It looks like the new house is eligible for Centurylink gigabit fiber as well, so I may be switching to that once my Comcast contract is up. We push a lot of data though (multiple people working and doing school from home), so having fast, reliable internet access throughout the house is super important.

Looking for any advice or suggestions please!

 

[SamirD]

Ruckus is some seriously good stuff--I'm actually shocked that you're getting it as part of a new home as most contractors are cheap and will throw in a garbage mesh system and call it a day.

I would simply treat it as the access points and see how that does. If you get to missing the wifi6, then you can simply add your existing APs where you need them using the wired infrastructure or upgrade the ruckus units.

One thing I would recommend if they haven't sealed up the walls yet is to run extra runs everywhere--literally everywhere. Even if you never end up using all of them, the ones you do will end up saving you A LOT compared to running stuff later. And you may even want to consider a pretermianted fibre drop between floors.

 

[Phaethar]

Nice, glad to hear it's good stuff!

I'll give that a try first then, and connect it as they recommend. Probably put the AX11000 in the basement and then run into the Ruckus.

I looked into how much the Ruckus WiFi6 APs cost, and yeah... they're not cheap. If I can keep everything important hard wired and only use WiFI for phones and stuff, I should be ok for a while.

And I tried to get more of the house wired. We found it after construction had started, and so were not able to make any changes. Wiring the entire house was my first request, but they couldn't do it. So it's nice that some of it is wired, but I need to find someone to wire up a few more bedrooms upstairs. The good news is that there is conduit and wire already running from the basement to the upper level, so I should just need to have the wires run and the wall plates installed in the remaining rooms. Are there companies that specialize in doing stuff like that? I"ve been looking around a bit online, but haven't had much luck yet.

 

[SamirD]

Yep, apparently they'll run much better than other APs in the same environment--they're true enterprise tech, super overkill for a house, and will be absolutely terrific. I'm actually jealous and I've got 2x ethernet ports in every room at my parents house.

If you have coax also wired, then moca is your friend as you can simply use a few moca adapters and have full gigabit for less trouble than running new ethernet.

As far as wiring up additional jacks, you want a company that does 'structured wiring' or 'structured cabling'. The problem is that these companies will send out some electrician monkey who will terminate your cables wrong, so just have them run the wire and terminate them yourself. It's sad that the same problem I ran into in 1995 is still faced by people every day with residences with ethernet installed. I even had to re-wire my own apartment terminal block that was a new construction and that I was the first tenant--'phone wiring' was in place for ethernet. Luckily, it was just re-terminating to fix it, but if I'm going to have to do the work, I don't want to pay someone else for it.

Now, this doesn't mean there aren't companies out there that do it right, but they generally will do jobs that cost 10x as much and are usually businesses. And they really won't touch smaller stuff because of the economies of scale. It took me a long time to find even a company to run the wires correctly at my parent's house moreless terminate them. I still have almost 20 jacks I have to re-terminate or just terminate in the first place.