Lennar Homeowners Ruckus Issues

[ElijahLL]

If you are a Lennar home owner with a Ruckus Unleased Wi-Fi system already installed unplug it. I bought a Lennar home 2 years ago with a Ruckus Unleashed Wi-Fi system in it & from day 1 we've had non-stop issues. 1st & most important fact (not opinion): Ruckus Wi-Fi systems are not designed for residential use, in fact Ruckus will not support residential users even if you try to pay for it. Ruckus used to have a dedicated Lennar support team & 1-800 phone line to help homeowners with their Ruckus systems but has discontinued the service as they realized they were spending too much money paying technicians to try walking homeowners through technical support when these units should never have been installed in their homes in the 1st place.

As a homeowner you CANNOT buy technical support from Ruckus which means that the remote admin access functions the Ruckus allows are completely useless unless the homeowner has an independent IT technician they pay to service their home's network. I personally tried to buy a service package directly from Ruckus to get support for my home Wi-Fi system & they would not sell it to me, they only provide true technical support for their business clients to whom they sell service plans.

Furthermore: unless you live in a 3,000+ sqft home, the modem/wireless router your internet provider supplies as part of your service, will cover just as much of your home as the Ruckus system does. My Lennar home is 1,700sqft & the Netgear wireless router I'm using (bought from Best Buy) covers my entire home with the same quality of signal (better actually) than our Ruckus system ever did.

Further furthermore: Ruckus has intentionally designed this forum (per their inhouse business support technicians) so that the information provided is too complicated for the common user to utilize. They don't want to spend a bunch of time & money trying to walk normal people through their overly-complicated, designed for commercial applications systems & settings because they know normal people can't figure it out, will give up & will either hire someone who can decipher the provided instructions &/or will just use the mode/router their internet provider gave them with the service. This last route is actually the best option for most home owners.

Don't be fooled, this forum is not to help Lennar home owners with their Ruckus systems. This forum exists to show Lennar homeowners that they have no business messing with their Ruckus systems unless they are a certified network technician.

In summary: Residential homeowners, do not buy Ruckus products for your home. Both Best Buy & Lennar have severed their relationship with Ruckus due to the issues with consumer usage. If you have a Ruckus system in your home & are having issues, unplug it entirely & just use the hardware provided by your internet company. And lastly, if you're like me & my neighbors, you have a Ruckus system in your home that you're not actually using (you're just using your internet modem/router) unplug it, it is transmitting 1 radio signal for each AP in your home & those unused radio signals are creating signal interference with the signal you are actually using (the one from your modem/router).

Ruckus techs: Don't you dare delete this. It is the only honest & real answer for Lennar homeowners in this entire forum. Shame on all of you for hiding the truth & wasting all our time.

[KRose]

This may be a dumb question, but your advice has been the easiest to follow on this whole site…. When you unhooked everything from your Ruckus, did you have Ring doorbell issues?  Mine won’t power on at all - and I believe it has to do with the Ruckus because it went out at the same time as the R510 access point.  I am definitely not an IT expert by any means - so please, if you know the fix, break it down easy for me.  

[ElijahLL]

We do have a ring doorbell, 3 smart TV's all on wifi, an ADT security system with 2 cameras (also on wifi), the Schlage door lock also wifi... all of them work great on the wireless router. Watcha do is use one of the cable splitters & the coax cable running to the garage where the initial device is at (the Xfinity guy told me it's called an "RFoG"). Where that coax spits out the other end in your media cabinet (where the big Ruckus box is at), you attach that end coming from the garage to the splitter "in" port, you'll screw it on the coax just like you would a TV or modem. Then what you wanna do is determine which room in your house has the most central coax outlet in it, ours is upstairs in the living room. Connect your modem to that coax outlet with as short a cord as you got & that will reach a nice spot to store your modem. The next step I did was go back to the media closet & start "guess & checking" the coax cables screwing them into the "out" port(s) on the coax splitter (the one attached to the RFoG thing in the garage) till I found the one connected to the modem. I was able to do that by walking over to the modem after I tried the 1st coax & waiting a couple seconds to see if it got signal from the RFoG thing in the garage. I got it on the 3rd try so it took a few minutes but was super easy. I just tried the 1st coax, walked over to the modem, stood there 30 seconds, walked back to the media closet, unscrewed it, tried another one, walked over to he modem...

Once the modem is connect to the RFoG out in the garage you are done, unless you have a stand alone wifi router but in that case you just use one of those short yellow network cables & attach the router right there next to the modem.

The ADT cameras took a few tries to connect as I had to do a full factory reset & log them on to the new wifi (instead of the Ruckus). The 2.4ghz frequency they run on seems a little weaker than the 5.6ghz your computers & wireless devices use.

Also, FTR I am no IT professional, I was able to bypass the Ruckus in like 30 minutes by just using the wifi router was plugged into the Ruckus. The Ruckus however, I spent 2 years messing with for 100's of total hours trying to keep up & running. Even my Lennar home rep told me it was a HUGE mistake putting them in our homes & they have completely severed ties with Ruckus & their products. Good luck, glad you were willing to give it a try... wish I would've 2 years ago.

[KRose]

Thank you, thank you! I will give this a try this weekend - you have been so helpful.  I’ve already fixed 3 devices within an hour of disconnecting from Ruckus, so I know I’m headed the right direction.  I can’t imagine how many more hours I would have spent trying to figure that out if not having come across your post.  I don’t know why disconnecting didn’t occur to me sooner.  Thank you! 

[Saustgen]

I've unplugged this system twice and it works fir about a day then stops. I need a tech. Any suggestions on who to contact!???