What is our primary use case?
The thing about Ruckus is that we have greater range, so we need fewer access points.
My Ubiquiti setup had, like, ten access points in a warehouse. With Ruckus, I only ordered six because I know I need fewer. So that's a savings if you want to look at it like that.
How has it helped my organization?
The Ruckus guest Wi-Fi setup seems to be the most helpful when it comes to managing security. The Ubiquiti access points have a guest hotspot feature, but unless you know what you're doing, you won't be able to separate that guest hotspot from your regular Wi-Fi. On the Ruckus side, if you want to separate your guest from your regular Wi-Fi, that's not a problem. It's almost impossible to combine the two.
In Ubiquiti, you think you're doing it, but when you actually test it, you can get to all your file servers on your guest network. There are ways to separate them, but you really have to know what you're doing. So I actually come across Ubiquiti networks all the time, and I'm able to get right to the other side of the network they're trying to protect because they're not really safe. They can be, but the documentation is garbage, and it's hard. So, out of the box, Ruckus is definitely safer.
What is most valuable?
Speed, throughput. That's number one. If you want to get close to Ethernet speed, you go with Ruckus. Throughput's amazing. They're very dependable.
Now, I've only deployed outdoor access points outdoors, so I can't really comment on how well they're gonna work indoors. But I spoke directly with Ruckus support folks last week, and they told me that they only deploy the outdoor access point in warehouses.
But I expect nothing but success because once we diagnosed our wireless problems, it all made sense. The access points that I get from Ruckus, the outdoor ones, will actually have a range of 160 degrees Fahrenheit down to minus 40, and that covers the extremes that are usually found in the metal roofing area of warehouses.
What needs improvement?
When Ruckus was fighting for survival, they had the most innovative ideas and concepts. But after Ruckus was bought by CommScope, their development slowed down considerably. I could see it on the boards, and people were happy because the technology was already at a point where it made their lives easier, but pushing forward stopped when CommScope came into the picture. You can actually even get the Ruckus salespeople to tell you that. It just seems like everything kinda stopped at that time. It's been something like four or five years.
That is a disappointment because these guys knew what they were doing, and it just seems like they've all kinda gone to bed now. Whenever a company buys another company, there's always some damage. And in this case, it's basically a lack of development. They're just stuck in time.
So, my suggestion would be for them to return to more innovative thinking or innovative ideas.
I still buy it. I just spent ten grand getting all of these access points, and I'm still bought into it, but it is not the same company it was before they were purchased.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using it since 2014, so it's been ten years.
How are customer service and support?
You can get support from Ruckus. With Ubiquiti, there are some products you can actually pay for support, but Ruckus support, at least for the first month without having to pay, is excellent. They'll get you up and running, no problem, with whatever product you buy. You can also pay for support down the road, which you can't do with Ubiquiti on all their products. You have to get the newest stuff on Ubiquiti before you can actually buy a support contract.
But I can pick up any Ruckus access point and get support, so I would give that ten out of ten. It's not, like, email only. They'll actually take a call. They'll even help you with stuff that you didn't buy directly from one of their resellers. You could buy stuff from eBay, and you'll get limited support from Ruckus on it. I mean, they will tell you to register it and then get a service contract, but you're not dead in the water like you are with Ubiquiti. You have nothing with Ubiquiti. There's no help.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
It's not complicated at all. It's probably the easiest. If you were looking at the complete ease of setting up a Ruckus Wi-Fi network, I don't think you could make it easier. It does 99.5% of it by itself. You literally power on the access points. The technology I use is called Ruckus Unleashed, which is a subset of the Ruckus access points. It got this "Unleashed" name because there's no controller. All the access points are capable of becoming the controller. So the first one you deploy builds the network. You give it specifics, like the IP subnet. That's it. You name it, and you let it do its thing.
If I had a power outage or one of my switches failed that the controller was on, the Ruckus Unleashed network is so advanced that it just makes another one of the access points that's still running the master controller. It takes over all of those roles, and it happens instantaneously. So, this network is self-healing. I'm not sure if it is AI, but it's self-healing. That's part of why you pay extra money, so not having a controller is one less failure point. It's pretty amazing, but it's the same exact technology that I deployed pre-pandemic. So it hasn't gotten any more advanced.
Ruckus Wireless utilizes AI:
The fact that if one of my access points got taken out, that doesn't take the network offline, which I can't say about Ubiquiti. When I lost three access points to the heat, it created network loopbacks in the Wi-Fi system, so the Wi-Fi was useless. In that way, you can call it AI, but it's not legit AI because it's not using any legit AI backend systems. It's just software. They've got really good software that has, you can call it, self-healing. It is self-healing, but it's sort of AI because when this technology was created, there was no viable link to AI.
I've been using it for so long that even the screens and all the different applications or features are still there. There's some new stuff, but with every release, they just move things around. Ruckus looks exactly the same from 2014 to now. You could sit somebody down who played with this ten years ago, and they would wonder if they're using ten-year-old tech. I don't know if it is a good thing or a bad thing, but it's nice. You don't have to rebuild anything.
What was our ROI?
In terms of operational impacts, you don't need a controller. The Ruckus access points do use more power, so you want to make sure you have a powerful enough PoE switch.
But once I have the right environment, I'm fine. I don't see anything that would stop me once I have a proper working environment.
Once I deploy the system, I won't spend any time on it at all. I'll just set the master access point to handle all of the firmware updates and tell it to do it after hours. After that, I won't really even log into the Wi-Fi system. I mean, I will to see if we have rogue access points out there or somebody's turned on something that shouldn't have, because the way Ruckus does its logs is way better than Ubiquiti. It's very easy to spot, like, "Oh, okay, so somebody's on this access point. They turned on a hotspot on their computer. They're trying to share my internet." I could find that pretty quickly.
I would have alerts that would be sent to me, and then I would go into it. But aside from that, I'm not going to do a whole lot because I know it's just going to work.
It's going to turn into a situation where people are going to find that the Wi-Fi is so fast that they're going to disconnect from Ethernet so that they can have the flexibility of moving around, and they'll be on Wi-Fi more often than not. That's what happens anytime you deploy a Wi-Fi system that's fast. You want to keep people on your Ethernet, deploy a low-end system, and people will always go to the faster system. But the cool thing about Ruckus is that it makes your Wi-Fi as fast as your internet.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with ten being expensive. I would spend my own money on Ruckus, so it's worth it.
It's a lot more expensive, three to four times more expensive compared to its competitors. But as the IT guy, not the money guy, I know that money is well worth being spent. So, I would take money out of other parts of my budget just to have Ruckus. There's no way around it; it costs a lot more.
It's probably one of the more expensive systems if you're going to break the units down to an access point. So it's up there in the top three.
I don't think if I had no experience with Ruckus, I would be bought in. Why would somebody pay that much money? It's the ten years of experience that I have and knowing that with this system, you're just not going to have problems. I would do it again and again and again.
There's probably not that many parts of IT where I don't look to save money because that's how we stay employed, by finding the cheapest viable solution. This is one area where I will flat out not hesitate and make sure I get Ruckus if I can.
What other advice do I have?
I have, and I will continue to recommend Ruckus Wireless to others because, other than the money, there's no downside.
It's a ten out of ten. They knocked it out of the park.