How about now that Ruckus is moving into SMB market, you enable MESH feature on stand-alone APs too. Tying this to a ZD IMO is a function of driving ZD sales than anything else.
Reasons:
- ZD is part of the management and control plane not access
- I can't remember the last time we implemented a MESH network for a big client, like a hotel or something but
- Big majority (talking from my experiences here) MESH requirements are for very small implementations of up to 3 APs which makes a ZD sale hard and usually causes a purchase of some other cheap vendor
- There are other more prominent features a ZD brings to a network, like: band-steering, coordinated channel allocation, logging, graphical speed tests, real time monitoring, zero-it, etc, etc, etc, so MESH really isn't a feature that makes a sale at all.
- You've got the R300 now which is the first AP that doesn't support MESH so selling a ZD because of MESH isn't an option.
I would say that sales of ZD wouldn't suffer a bit since there are other easier reasons for selling a ZD and I would rather sell stand-alone APs now and maybe a ZD later, then loose an opportunity because of pushing for a ZD at the start.
