Newbie to the fold with a few questions!

[jason_sparrow]

Hi all,

Im looking at jumping from the Unifi ship as i find their products extremely frustrating, coverage poor and things are showing disabled when they aren't etc so...

I live in a standard two story house and at present, i have aUnifi AP pro on the landing upstairs, and one in the main living room downstairs. This provides reasonable coverage on the 5ghz band, but regardless of settings etc, most of our devices are roaming like mad, even when they havent moved for a hour or so, and when our iphones sleep, they disconnect and latch on to the mobile network which in turn uses my data allowance.

What Ruckus product would you recommend to replace my existing Ap Pros?

Do i need two of a higher spec?

My current set up is a Ubiquiti Edgerouter poe, am 802.11af 16 port switch (which provides the 48V to the AP's)

many thanks for any help

🙂

[john_d]

Without trying out what coverage you get from a single AP, it is hard to tell. Since with your Ubiquiti setup it sounds like you needed one AP per level for adequate 5GHz coverage, I would be inclined to suggest the 2xR500 approach to get excellent 5GHz coverage.

With 802.11ac, strong 5GHz coverage really matters. The super fast 802.11AC rates (256QAM) only work when the 5GHz signal is relatively strong. Otherwise, you'll get more N-like performance, which is fine, but you're not getting a ton of 802.11ac advantage.

In my experience, using a iMac as my test machine (which as 3 spatial streams), I get about 300-350mbit on a R500, and 400-425mbit on a R600, so there is some diminishing return for the 3rd stream such that you don't get 1/3 better performance by adding one more antenna. On an iPhone or iPad, there's only 1 or 2 antennas (spatial streams) on the device respectively, so the R500 and R600 would perform identically.

Overall, I'd suggest the 2xR500 approach, especially if the alternative is to get a single AP. Or, you can always start off with a single R500 and use that to gauge how much coverage you get... Or buy from a reseller with a good return policy so you can change your mind if needed.

[jason_sparrow]

Ok ill go for the 2 x 500 approach, on your recommendation, as the im sure these will perform better than the Ubiquiti's.

Do i need anything else to set these up other than the Web UI?

And do they handle roaming well enough to be seemless (ish)?

[john_d]

Nope -- the WebUI is all you need. I'm sure with your EdgeRouter you won't have much trouble figuring out the IP address of your AP's -- they will use DHCP by default and fall back to 192.168.0.1 if there's no DHCP server.

Keep your eyes peeled for a Standalone AP firmware release 100.2 or later when it comes out for R500/600 -- currently these AP's do not support DFS channels (56 to 140) with standalone. This was added in ZoneDirector 9.12 so there should be a matching standalone build soon.

As far as roaming, they should roam seamlessly. Roaming is a client side behavior and there's little that the infrastructure can do in that regard. There is an 802.11r fast transition that's available on controller based networks but with PSK there's not too much benefit to it --- the benefit is primarily for those using WPA2 enterprise authentication.

[jason_sparrow]

Ok ill keep an eye out for the fw update.

i am still trying to navigate around this site at the moment! 😄

My current channels for 5ghz are 44 for downstairs and 136 for upstairs, however i do not have any rogue 5ghz networks interfering at the moment, or is it the fact that the 56 to 140 is better anyway?

Please excuse all my questions as i am still very new to all this, even though ive been fighting with the unifis for the last few months!

[john_d]

Not a problem at all — always nice to see another home network admin who is not willing to settle for flaky wifi!

So that's actually a really good question. Here's my take on it. Historically, channels 36-48 (at least in the USA) are lower transmit power than the rest of the 5GHz channels. As a result, they're the least appropriate for penetrating walls, but on the bright side, it's really really unlikely that your neighbors' networks would interfere with you on these channels. However, recently (like almost a year ago) the FCC has made a recommendation that you can actually transmit higher power on channels 36-48. However, I've yet to see any AP's actually take advantage of this — in the syslog when a Ruckus AP boots, it prints out a channel list and the transmit power per channel, and it still shows 36-48 as the lowest transmit power 5GHZ channels. Note that, not surprisingly, some consumer AP's and custom firmware have no regard for FCC transmit power limits, but that's another can of worms.


On the other end of the spectrum, channels 149 to 161 have come into great popularity because the FCC lets you transmit at a pretty high power (the highest power of any of the 5GHz channels). You can get *almost* 2.4GHZ-like coverage on these channels. On the flipside, I've found there's a lot more non-802.11 5GHz interference up at these channels. I believe the first generation of DECT cordless phones (the ones that called themselves 5GHz or 6GHz) transmitted around this range. Note that newer DECT "5.0" cordless phones transmit at 1.9GHz and don't interfere with wifi at all. But of course, you can't exactly knock on your neighbor's door and ask them to upgrade their cordless phones!

The DFS channels are in between this range, and the regulatory power is also in between, making them excellent channels to use. What makes them even better is that DFS channels require AP's to detect military radar usage that is on this band (and switch to another channel if interference is detected). In practice, this is complicated and you have to pay more to be FCC certified to operate on DFS, so most consumer AP's don't bother. This is a blessing if you live in a crowded apartment complex like me, where all the other 5GHz channels are flooded with my neighbors' AP's but the DFS channels are nearly empty. It's also nice because 802.11ac lets you run super wide 80MHz channels, and there's only a few of those if you don't use DFS. Even if you don't have neighbors, if you plan on expanding past 2 or 3 access points, you might find yourself with co-channel interference if you can't use DFS channels.

In your network with 2 R500's, all of these channels should work fine for you. If you only had 1 AP, I would suggest using one of the channels 52 or higher, especially the 149-161 channels if they are clean in your area.



Hope this info helps!