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

🙂

[jason_sparrow]

Brilliant, that is an explanation that cannot be found on the internet anywhere!

So, at the moment there is still a possibility that Ruckus will issue a fw update for the AP's to have a higher 5ghz channel range? I must say that is one thing the Unifis have and that is very decent 5ghz channel selection, although as i dont really have much interference with neighbours, i guess any of the 36-48 channels will be ok?

Or, would i be better going for a different model to the 500/600 to get the higher range?

🙂

[john_d]

That, you'll have to hope Michael Brado and the other Ruckus reps will answer. I would expect that the R500/R600 standalone firmware will get DFS support soon -- it's hard to imagine why they wouldn't. This feature is a 9.12 ZD feature, which is the 100.2.x.x firmware series or higher. The current 100.1 firmware is based off ZD 9.11, which also did not have DFS support.

I'm not sure I'd suggest upgrading from the R500/R600 solely for DFS support for home use -- that's several hundred dollars extra per AP, and chances are in a few months at most the difference will be moot. I purchased a R700 for my home network at full price -- it has had DFS from day one, but in retrospect I feel kind of silly, because with 80% of my devices I can see no performance difference between the R700 and the R500/R600. It's a magnificent AP and I look forward to having a ton of guests over to show it off. But fact of the matter is, the majority of time when I'm at home, I don't have the device density to show a difference between R500/R600/R700.

[jason_sparrow]

Ok understood!

I have bitten the bullet and have ordered 2 r600's (ouch!!) so I'm hoping they are a lot better than the Unifi!

And no doubt I'll be back asking a million questions about set up!

Thanks again for your valued input, it is very much appreciated.

[seanmuir]

Hey Jason,

Be careful with 5GHz as some clients don't connect to the UNII 2 ext channels - my Nexus 9 for one doesn't even see UNII 2 either 😞

I would recommend that you test each of your devices to see if they are compatible with the UNII 2e channels, and if they are then I would blacklist the lower channels, as you get more power on the UNII 2-ext channels in the UK (1W as opposed to 200mW when using the lower UNII-1/2 bands).

To blacklist channels use the following command in the cli:

set blacklist wlan8 -1

so

set blacklist wlan32 34 -1
set blacklist wlan32 36 -1
set blacklist wlan32 38 -1
set blacklist wlan32 40 -1
set blacklist wlan32 42 -1
set blacklist wlan32 44 -1
set blacklist wlan32 46 -1
set blacklist wlan32 48 -1

Note the 5GHZ radio was wlan8 on certain versions of firmware; I cant rememeber when it changed 🙂

[jason_sparrow]

Hi Sean,

We are mainly an Apple household in the UK(i know, i know!) and everything seems to be connecting just fine as far as i'm aware!

Most of our devices are working on the 5G AC band, but we do have an older Windows laptop thats 2.4 only and so far, all ok.

One thing i did notice was how much quicker and smoother throughput is on these AP's and also, none of our devices (mainly iphones) are falling back to mobile internet when they sleep.

So, all in all, they are fantastic and a huge step up on my previous 'enterprise' APs, and so much simpler to install.

Once i plugged them in and found their IP, i had them BOTH set up in about 15 minutes, rather than the 2/3 hours before of setting up, rebooting AP's reinstalling controllers etc etc etc!