Ruckus Wireless as an Unifi alternative?

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

Vesalius

Active Member
Nov 25, 2019
252
190
43
Thank you been sitting out the WiFi 6 *50 series to go with a longer term WiFi 6E variants for my home upgrade where I can be consistently within range and have the devices to utilize. Looks like 860 or 660 for me a year or 2 from now. Also looks like increased power with Poe ++ for 6E by what is out from ruckus so far.

Haven't seen this mentioned yet. Ruckus WiFi 6E webinar. Mostly marketing blaa blaa blaa but a few useful tidbits.


View attachment 18675

View attachment 18676
 

jjacobs

Member
Dec 25, 2020
74
32
18
CO
Thank you been sitting out the WiFi 6 *50 series to go with a longer term WiFi 6E variants for my home upgrade where I can be consistently within range and have the devices to utilize. Looks like 860 or 660 for me a year or 2 from now. Also looks like increased power with Poe ++ for 6E by what is out from ruckus so far.
What do you think they're going to cost? No flea-bay deals on these for a while...
 

Vesalius

Active Member
Nov 25, 2019
252
190
43
What do you think they're going to cost? No flea-bay deals on these for a while...
I expect them to retail at similar prices to the 850 and 650, but hold that for quite some time before any potential deals can be had. So I might not be installing one for 2-4 years unless I am willing to pay near full price.

After the r*60 release I would expect the R*50‘s to become more affordable on eBay and I might change my mind on using them if real world test demonstrate 6E is not either as useful or a big enough improvement in practical use.
 

jjacobs

Member
Dec 25, 2020
74
32
18
CO
I was also holding off on a WiFi 6 upgrade thinking 6E will be the way to go. It's going to be years before all of the devices I connect wireless are 6E compatible. Sonos speakers, iPads, iPhones, Macbooks. I don't really care about the increased throughput but the clean spectrum would be great (multi-tenant building). iPads and iPhones are up for replacement this year but I don't think they will be 6E but still WiFi 6.

I think I'll revisit this in a couple of years and be on the lookout for good deals on R750 or R850's in the mean time or just be happy with the R710's. I don't see an upgrade to a multi-gigabit POE switch happening in the next year or two either. It's going to take a long time for the stars to align to make this worth doing in a home environment.

I'm curious what others are thinking concerning WiFi 6E?
 

dragonian

Member
Jan 3, 2020
47
30
18
While thinking of planning ahead while building house, (won't call it future proofing)..
Planning for 3-4 r610s for now, running from a ICX7250.

Should I run 2x cat6/cat6a for LACP/LAG to each AP? or assume that in the future NBASE-T becomes more prevalent, and I can get away with only one run? Thoughts?
 

TXAG26

Active Member
Aug 2, 2016
397
120
43
Unless you’re building a 10,000 sq.ft. house or using solid concrete block interior walls, 3-4 R610’s sounds way overkill. I’d definitely run 2x Cat6/Cat6a drops to 3, 4, or 5 different locations where an access point may be handy to have since wire drops are cheap during construction, but I’d hold off on buying that much hardware until I’d had a chance to see how 1 or 2 does in that space.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Vesalius

Vesalius

Active Member
Nov 25, 2019
252
190
43
Unless you’re building a 10,000 sq.ft. house or using solid concrete block interior walls, 3-4 R610’s sounds way overkill. I’d definitely run 2x Cat6/Cat6a drops to 3, 4, or 5 different locations where an access point may be handy to have since wire drops are cheap during construction, but I’d hold off on buying that much hardware until I’d had a chance to see how 1 or 2 does in that space.
As stated 3 is likely overkill, I say that as someone that went with 3, and 4 almost certainly is unless the house is really huge or a high rise with 4-5 floors for you.

I would also suggest running 2x Cat6/Cat6a drops to 3, 4, or 5 different locations that seem most reasonable. You are correct for at least Ruckus APs as NBASE-T is already the way they chose to go over LACP/LAG to each AP in the r*50 series. I run LACP to my r710's now, but the second run is a great for redundancy in case of failure even if you can't use it for LACP/LAG in the most recent ruckus AP's.
 

sth

Active Member
Oct 29, 2015
379
91
28
Without understanding more about the property, its construction and use case, its impossible to say if 3 or 4 is overkill. I run 3 APs in a 1500sqft home and dont consider it overkill.
 

dragonian

Member
Jan 3, 2020
47
30
18
Understood that 4 APs might be overkill. The house is 2300 sqft on the main level, and 1600 on the lower level (+ garage).
My thought was that I would have 2 on the main level. One in the pantry on one side of the house, and one in the master closet on the other.
And wire for a potential 1 or 2 on the lower level, if I find that they are needed.

Rather have extra wire now, than need it later.
Thanks for the heads up that the next gen stuff currently does not support LACP. I'm not really sure that I need wifi6/6E anytime soon, but I'm sure eventually it will be a thing.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Vesalius

Scarlet

Member
Jul 29, 2019
86
38
18
I'm currently planning the network installation for the new house (concrete and bricks). There'll be 5 floors including the basement, I'm planning to start with two ceiling mounted R710s (one on the 3rd floor, one on the 1st floor). I'll have some more Cat 6 drops installed, but the contractor charges €220 per drop.
 

Vesalius

Active Member
Nov 25, 2019
252
190
43
I'm currently planning the network installation for the new house (concrete and bricks). There'll be 5 floors including the basement, I'm planning to start with two ceiling mounted R710s (one on the 3rd floor, one on the 1st floor). I'll have some more Cat 6 drops installed, but the contractor charges €220 per drop.
My concern here would be coverage for floors 4 and moreso 5 as the wifi coverage above a ceiling-mounted r710 drops off quickly. The antenna array is optimized below and to the sides of their ceiling mounted AP's.

EDIT: likely misinterpreted given the basement floor and you would then only have one floor to cover above the 3rd floor AP and not 2.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Scarlet

Scarlet

Member
Jul 29, 2019
86
38
18
3rd floor is the top floor, so the space to be covered by the R710s is mostly downwards :)

The plan is: 3rd floor AP should cover 3rd and 2nd floor, 1st floor AP should cover 1st floor and ground floor. If that doesn't work out 2nd floor and maybe ground floor will get extra APs. WLAN in the basement is optional.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Vesalius

fohdeesha

Kaini Industries
Nov 20, 2016
2,727
3,075
113
33
fohdeesha.com







Code:
ruckus$ cat /etc/version
200.9.10.4.243 based on //depot/release/unleashed_200.9.10.4 CL 839647
ruckus$ bsp set fixed_ctry_code 0
ruckus$ bsp commit
Saving flash .....
bdSave: sizeof(bd)=0x7c, sizeof(rbd)=0xd0
  caching flash data from /dev/mtd16 [ 0x00000000 - 0x00010000 ]
  updating flash data [0x00000000 - 0x0000007c] from [0x7e9f3a6c - 0x7e9f3ae8]
  updating flash data [0x00008000 - 0x000080d0] from [0x7e9f3ae8 - 0x7e9f3bb8]
_erase_flash: offset=0x0 count=1
Erasing 64 Kibyte @ 0 -- 100 % complete
  caching flash data from /dev/mtd16 [ 0x00000000 - 0x00010000 ]
  verifying flash data [0x00000000 - 0x0000007c] from [0x7e9f3a6c - 0x7e9f3ae8]
  verifying flash data [0x00008000 - 0x000080d0] from [0x7e9f3ae8 - 0x7e9f3bb8]
... Changes saved to flash



 

fmatthew5876

Member
Mar 20, 2017
80
18
8
38
I setup my Ruckus R310 today. I really appreciate that configuring this device is just a barebones dead simple web UI you can login to. For home use I couldn't ask for more.

I really hate the Unifi controller software you have to install for ubiquiti.
 
  • Like
Reactions: fohdeesha

mattlach

Active Member
Aug 1, 2014
323
89
28
So, I was busy with moves and other issues for about two years. When I went offline I was still pretty happy with my Unifi's (home network with three AP-AC-LR's) but when I came back online, betweehn the cloud hack, company lies about the cloud hack and the unceremonious discontinuation of Unifi Video it has me wondering if local Unifi Controllers will also go away, and if I will be forced onto the cloud.

For those reasons and more, I too am unhappy with Unifi. They used to be the good guys 10 years ago, but they have now turned into Meraki.

After some preliminary research Ruckus is the leading contender (but I am also researching if I can make Fortinet's AP's work), but damn they are much more expensive.

Currently, I have the three Unifi AP-AC-LR's and a Unifi Controller running in a dedicated LXC container on my server. The new digs are a bit smaller than the old, and from reading this thread Ruckus is much better at dealing with interference (which is amazing to me, as the reason I first went to Unifi back in ~2010 it was because they sliced through the noise like no consumer wifi solution could, like some sort of black magic) so I am thinking I can probably get away with only two Ruckus AP's, I'm guessing in an Unleashed configuration, so I don't need to pay for a controller license.

The original plan was to just to make the switch when I was ready to upgrade from ac to ax (or Wifi 6 or whatever the stupid new naming convention is) but looking around I can't seem to find any Ruckus ax AP's that are affordable.

I'm trying to figure out if it is really worth it to invest in older R710 ac units at this point, or if I should just keep using the Unifi units until more ugly Ubiquiti behavior forces me off them. (the hack bothers me, but doesn't affect me directly, as I don't use their cloud services, but if they force me to, I'll shut off my AP's the same day, and keep them off until replaced with something that doesn't)

Any thoughts here? Are older R710 ac units a bad buy today? It really feels wrong to spend money on previous gen tech, but maybe it doesn't matter, especially since our Wifi use is limited (most work done on desktops, everything that isn't a laptop oe a phone is hardwired, very little "smart" devices)

Can anyone tell me how many SSID's these devices support? And do they support a trunked multi-VLAN upload and then assigning different VLAN's to different SSID's, like I am currently doing with my Unifi devices? Switch on the other end would be Mikrotik.

Also, what kind of PoE injectors would be recommended?


Greatly appreciated!
 

klui

Well-Known Member
Feb 3, 2019
824
453
63
Any thoughts here? Are older R710 ac units a bad buy today? It really feels wrong to spend money on previous gen tech, but maybe it doesn't matter, especially since our Wifi use is limited (most work done on desktops, everything that isn't a laptop oe a phone is hardwired, very little "smart" devices)

Can anyone tell me how many SSID's these devices support? And do they support a trunked multi-VLAN upload and then assigning different VLAN's to different SSID's, like I am currently doing with my Unifi devices? Switch on the other end would be Mikrotik.
Yes, but I'm biased because I have an R510 and R610 at home.

Our household doesn't need the newest tech and WiFi 5 does the job. If I invest in WiFi 6 I would need to add a multi-gig capable switch in production for full benefit. Why does it feel wrong to spend money on older technology? These WiFi 5 Wave 2 APs are "older" but not obsolete. They're still getting updates. Even Ruckus's WiFi 5 Wave 1 APs (Xn00s) got an update for FragAttacks. If it weren't for security vulnerabilities, I'd say even 802.11n is fine. Just look at the huge Brocade thread. The ICX 6000s are still great even though software development ceased Nov. 2019. You pay a premium for buying the newest, and I'll gladly have others do that to make sure the product is robust before I jump in.

RE: max SSIDs, I posted it elsewhere at STH: https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...dio-802-11ac-wave-2-99-each.30866/post-285819. It's 16. But that answer was based on a post answered 5 years ago and the KB is not accessible from a free account so I'm not sure if their new WiFI 6 APs have the same limitation.

Not sure what you mean by trunked multi-VLAN upload, but they do support different tagged VLANs per SSID going through a trunk port. You can also configure it through its webUI. There has been one STH member that was confused about native VLAN limitations but it can be any VLAN ID, not limited to VLAN 1.

I'm not a wifi expert but I've read the client is probably the limiting factor rather than the station and it's logical people currently have more devices that won't support the full capabilities of WiFi 6 than those that do.


https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/jd23nw