Is Channelfly usable in real world scenarios?

[jeff_roback]

While ChannelFly is a truly remarkable technology, I'm wondering if people have found that it's usable in real-world scenarios.

For better or worse, Wi-Fi environments tend to be BYOD almost by definition, so we don't have too much control over what users show up with. And while one could work with people individually to update drivers, or have discussions about "It's not us it's them", the end result, in our experience has been end users saying "your Wi-Fi sucks", which is obviously the opposite of what we're trying to accomplish with a Ruckus deployment. (And according to Tom's Hardware it's supposed to be the other way around). In public Hotspot scenarios we'll never even hear from people whose connections didn't work, they just won't come back....

So I'm looking for guidance here from both Ruckus and from other VARs/Customers. Have you found that in anything but a completely controlled environment you safely turn on ChannelFly and have a high success rate with end users? If not, do you see this changing over time?

Either way it seems like it might be a good idea for Ruckus to put a whitepaper out there with this discussion. Customers or new VARs that are deploying this for the first time who end up with ChannelFly on by default are going to get an extremely negative first impression of Ruckus, which is really too bad because the technology overall is truly remarkable, but this one checkbox, in our experience, can change the overall experience dramatically.

Jeff

[rob_coote]

I too experienced some problems with the early iterations of CF, most notably AP's changing channels way too frequently (20-30 times per hour). It has since been disabled and I may turn it back on now that we are on version 9.7 just to see if any improvement has been made.

[gt_hill]

ChannelFly is definitely not something that should or needs to be turned on in every situation. It really shines in heavily congested Wi-Fi areas. For example, when there are a lot of other access points / networks it really rocks. In cleaner, non-high density environments it typically doesn't need to be enabled.

A new advancement in CF is a MTBC (Mean Time Between Change) setting. You can set it to not change channels as often.

My opinion is that if your network is operating fine without it, don't turn it on. But in cases where interference is prevalent, ChannelFly is a network saver.

GT Hill

[primoz_marinsek]

For 24/7 network monitoring and performance I would suggest you check this out

http://www.7signal.com/

[bill_burns_6069]

I opened another question here:
https://forums.ruckuswireless.com/ruc...

Please add whatever experiences you have with 7signal there.

Thanks.

[keith_redfield]

There may be a "best of both worlds" opportunity in that 9.7 adds a feature to have ChannelFly take effect when the AP first boots and then shut down after n minutes (user selectable). See below