Ruckus r510 range improvement for dummies?

[eric_hutchens]

We recently purchased a smart home that has a Ruckus r510 AP installed in the ceiling of the front entryway, which is connected to a Ruckus ICX-7150 switch in a media cabinet in the laundry room.  All the smart home features seem to be working pretty well --- the only complaint I have is that there are a few "dead spots", locations in the house  where it seems to take forever to get my smartphone to communicate to the smart home devices through the supporting apps.  I was wondering what options I might have to improve reception/range to try to eliminate these dead spots. I would not consider myself an expert on home Wi-Fi & networking, but I'm a quick study --- I'm hoping for a fairly economical solution that would also minimizes the chances of me unintentionally crashing my smart home to a point where I can't recover with my limited knowledge!

[eric_hutchens]

I've had a few distractions in getting back to this, hope to be able to continue with fewer interruptions today! Here's what I've got so far:

The ICX-7150 switch is mounted in the structured media enclosure (SME) located in the wall of the laundry room. There are 8 device cables currently plugged into the switch ports:

 1. Ethernet port in Living Room
 2. Ethernet Port in Family Room
 3. Ethernet port in Master Bedroom
 4. Lutron home lighting interface device 
 5. Samsung Smart Things home interface device
 6. Kevo home interface device
 7. Ring doorbell
 8. Ruckus r510 AP

The device currently plugged into the modem (which I will be shortly be moving to the switch) is a Pentair equipment panel. This will become the 9th device cable into the switch, leaving 3 empty ports on this 12-port switch.

There is also a short internet communications cable running between the switch and the cable modem.

There is a coaxial cable plugged into the modem labeled "NID" (Network Interface Device?), that I believe runs out to the cable TV interface box mounted on the exterior of the house. There is another blue ethernet, cable also labeled "NID", dangling into the SME --- probably just supplied to give the cable company some flexibility (coax or ethernet) in the connection type between the SME and the cable TV interface box on the exterior of the house.

Other than a bundle of dangling coax cables for unused cable TV ports in various rooms in the house, I don't see any other cables coming into the SME that are unaccounted for.

< continued in next post...> 

[eric_hutchens]

I'm going to try to attach a couple of pix of my ceiling-mounted AP here. If this works...

In the first photo (which looks like it came out upside-down, sorry about that!), notice my issue with seeing the backside of the AP --- it's mounted too close to the ceiling beam behind it, so I can't get my head/eyes up there to see much. So I got more creative & I stuck my smartphone camera up in there to get the second photo. It's a bit blurry, but you can see the blue ethernet cable plugged into the back. Given the super-limited field-of-view I have through the cutout on the back of the AP cover, maybe you can image why I was attempting to remove the cover. I still don't see any way to release anything --- the smaller slot next to the larger cutout on the back of the cover is directly in front of a power port on the AP.  If this AP ever dies, I have no idea how to get it off the ceiling to replace it....

< continued in next post... > 

[james_anderson1]

To remove the access point from the mounting posts, look for a small hole in the side of the access point to insert a paperclip.  The paperclip will release a spring loaded catch mechanism.  While pressing the paperclip into the hole to release the cach, slide the access point along the mounted surface.  This will slide the mounting posts into the release position of the groves and the access point will disengage from the mounting posts, allowing the access point to drop from your ceiling.  The mounting posts for ceiling mount are typically small screws with the heads engaging a grove in the access point.  When replacing the access point, also use the paperclip to release the spring loaded cache mechanism to allow the heads of the mounting posts to slide past them in the far end of the grove.

[eric_hutchens]

So, long story short, I don't see any sign of an additional ethernet cable pulled to the AP. If there was a big enough advantage, I might consider going up in the attic crawlspace and trying to drop-in another cable.

A follow-up on the question about "cryptic" client device names shown on the AP. I suspect that some of these unknown clients on the AP are going to be little gizmos that don't provide any way to log-in.  I was hoping that there was some way, other than maybe unplugging a device and watching for something to disappear from the AP client list, that I could associate one of the these mystery clients with a physical device. For example, I think the AP will show me a MAC address for every client, but then I am unable to find any MAC info indicated on the individual devices.... 

[hayward_kong]

From the photos it seems to be one cable only. Yeah if you want the ruckus to act as a gateway router you should have two cables running into it which would simplify things for you. Note when running in gateway mode your max WiFi devices that it can handle is 100. If running in standard AP mode it can handle up to 500 WiFi devices . If you don’t want to run a 2nd cable you can do something similar as now. However you would get a separate modem and separate router such as edgerouter x.

As for devices names start keeping a list of what it is associated with.