Leave single R500 Stand Alone or convert to Unleashed

[sean_mcneal]

Hello,

I have a single R500 AP and probably will not need to add another at any time. Just wondering if there are any performance advantages to making this an Unleashed AP?

Another similar question - with a single AP would there be any performance enhancements with a zone director? In other words, am I still getting all of the Ruckus tech like beam forming, and band steering with just the single AP or is the zone director required to unlock those?

Sorry - noob to Ruckus

[andrea_coppini]

The performance is all there - BeamFlex is a hardware technology built into the APs so it is the same whichever management platform you use - however Unleashed will give you more functionality even on just one AP without impacting performance.

[william_burnett]

More Functionality?

Where? Maybe the guest services (poorly implemented at this point).

. It is insanity to not be able to select or create SSIDS per radio... in fact it is laughable that somebody made the decision that this feature should not be included in a SMB product, where it is needed the most. So we either fully disable 2.4 and cripple some clients, or allow it, knowing MOST devices will see it and connect to it first. So take the typical SMB installation, 1 or 2 APs in a building with numerous tenants and dozens of other WLANS. 2.4 1, 6 and 11 are jammed to the hilt with a SNR so poor that they are barely usable. Yet, you need to keep a 2.4 WLAN running so that older devices can connect if need be. You also want to create a 5GHz WLAN so that you can find some free air space for the bulk of your client connections...

This is the norm, not the special case, yet UNLEASHED does not accommodate this scenario... but it sure does have pretty graphics. Doesn't anybody consider real world use before pretty GUIs and half baked features?

[john_d]

Yeah I could see going either way. The performance due to RF technology is all there whether you use Unleashed or Standalone.

Standalone has a couple features that Unleashed doesn't (or can't) have, including being able to define private subnets and perform NAT, and very fine grained control over the SSID(s) on 2.4GHz vs 5GHz if you want per-band SSIDs.

If you don't need any of those features, then I think Unleashed is a better choice overall. It's much easier to find the admin panel with unleashed.ruckuswireless.com. It shows information in a more meaningful manner including having Application Layer Visibility. And it also supports 802.11r/k fast transition (since you have a single AP, you'd just be roaming between 2.4GHz and 5GHz, but it's nonetheless helpful).

[daniel_m]

In an environment where I had a single standalone AP, I found Unleashed improved everything overall after the upgrade (for one specific example, a couple clients occasionally had issues maintaining connectivity and the issue immediately went away after upgrading).