I bought a cheap R730 off ebay. It looked pretty sad when I received it, as it clearly had a huge sticker on it originally. Five minutes of work with some goo-gone and it looks like new!
Anyway, I followed
@ms264556's awesome guide to make it think it's an R850, then installed Unleashed. It appears I got a "good" one, everything went exactly like the guide describes. Delightfully unremarkable.
I currently have two Ubiquiti WAPs in my house, an A6-Pro and AC-Pro. They actually have been working just fine for me, but this thread gave me bad GAS! (But I also had a more rational reason to try - my friends are having some WiFi issues in their home, and I thought this might be worth a try.)
My house has a fairly central coat closest where I ran two ethernet cables. So I put the new Ruckus WAP in the closet where the U6-Pro lives. IOW, the two WAPs are essentially in the same spot.
Anyway - I'm powering my R730/faux R850 from my
Brocade ICX6450-48p, i.e. 1gbps and PoE+ (802.3at class 4) only. As others in this thread have reported, I was getting the warning in the Unleashed GUI that insufficient power was available.
It does appear that forcing the higher-power mode (802.3bt class 5) improves performance considerably. Before doing that, I did a really informal analysis - I walked around various points in my house, and took signal readings (using "nOversight" on my iPhone and "WiFi Analyzer" on my wife's Android phone) and throughput tests on the two different WAPs.
I was initially disappointed - the Ruckus signal was consistently 10dB or so lower and throughput worse. So I thought I'd force it to 802.3bt mode and see what happens. It took me a bit to find where in the Unleashed GUI to make the change. First go to Access Points, then select the device you want to change, then click Edit (upper left), then select the Other tab. That's where the PoE Operating Mode config lives. I checked the Override Group Config checkbox, and selected 802.3bt/class5.
After that, I repeated my tests and it was almost a night-and-day difference. I now have a few dB stronger signal from the R730/faux R850, but throughput is almost always anywhere from 2x to 10x higher versus the Ubiquiti.
My only concern is that the Ruckus might try to draw more power than the ICX6450 can safely provide. So far, it's well under the budget:
Code:
#show inline power 1/1/42
Port Admin Oper ---Power(mWatts)--- PD Type PD Class Pri Fault/
State State Consumed Allocated Error
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
1/1/42 On On 13900 30000 802.3at Class 4 3 n/a
That's the highest I've seen, and I grabbed that while my wife and I both did throughput tests on our phones. I suppose if I had a big party and everyone decided to do throughput tests maybe the power draw would get significantly higher? It's going to be limited by the 1gbps wire to the switch anyway. But clearly in typical use we're well under 50% of the power budget. And given that the ICX6450 is an enterprise-grade device, I'm
hoping it has self-protection mechanisms in place (maybe
@fohdeesha knows?).
Anyway, I'm going to run with this for a couple weeks to make sure there's no hiccups, and then take it to my friends' to see if it helps them. If so, I'll probably buy another one or two to replace my Ubiquiti setup.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread, it's super-helpful!