My whole house Ruckus WiFi setup
When I moved into my new home, I expanded my existing Ruckus setup to give me coverage across my entire property. Here is all the details of that setup and why I chose Ruckus over my old Ubiquiti Unifi setup
AP's
I have 1 Ruckus R510, and two R310's. There isn't much difference between the two for home use, so if you were looking for one I would go with the R310 (Or 320, 330, whatever is current). The 310 is also smaller, so that may be beneficial. These all have PoE gigabit ports, but they also support being powered via a power adapter, and they do support mesh if you can't run ethernet over to them
All of these are running the Unleashed firmware which means the controller is baked into the AP, and one AP controls the rest (And if one goes offline, it fails over etc.). If you get one that is running the controller managed firmware, you can freely just download the Unleashed firmware for it (This makes for good deals on eBay, as people all want the Unleashed ones!)
Placement
Here are some images and where they are mounted, the first is near my living room and kitchen. This is the R510
The second is one of the R310's and that's mounted across the house near my office and bedroom
As you can see, these AP's don't look nearly as fancy as some other AP's, but they more than make up for that with performance and reliability
The third AP is mounted under the soffit of my detached garage. These are not designed to go outdoors, but its covered enough here to not have any issues, and its been going for well over a year with no problem. All temps are within range
This gives me excellent coverage in the garage, and across the entire of my back yard, which is great.
You can see I have a bench here, so I get awesome wireless sitting outside, and even further back are the fire pit
Here is a small diagram of where they are on my property. Ignore the dirty pool... This was from a while ago
I didn't use any kind of software to plan where they went, I just looked around the home and figured where would be best compared to the other AP's. So far this has worked very well.
There is one spot where coverage isn't excellent, and that's if I am sit inside my car, at the end of my driveway, here where the yellow is. So I plan on adding a fourth AP where the number 4 is, which should solve that problem
Because of a few walls being in the way of number 2, and being inside a car, I'll only get 100-120Mb/s throughput, which isn't great compared to the usual performance
Speed
The speed I get from these AP's is great, it may not be the fastest as these are no longer the newest AP's around, but it more than meets my needs, and more importantly the speed is extremely consistent. There are no slow spots on my entire property apart from the one mentioned which only happens when I am also inside a vehicle
This is what I can generally expect sitting around 20ft from an AP (Ignore the high latency, that speed test server was a bit wonky)
around 600/600 is generally what I will get from a normal device. This holds up well even when downloading large files on a laptop, no problems
I took the following Speedtest from all the way at the back of my yard. Even all the way back there, over 400Mb/s, and that was on my old iPhone 6S
As you can see, the speed, latency and range are excellent. This is where I was when I took the speed test
Infrastructure
All of these AP's are wired with Cat6a which runs back to my server closet, none of them use Mesh. They do support it, but there was no point since I could easily run Ethernet to all of them, even the outside ones.
The AP's in my house are connected to my server rack in a closet, and get data and power from my Dell X1052P switch (Which supports PoE+, which the AP's also support)
From there, the cables go up and out of the room, into the attic, where they eventually meet the AP's
You'll notice there is a patch missing for the 3rd AP. That's because that one is fed from the rack in my garage. The red patch cable is what feeds the AP (Ignore the other messy cables, I have not yet finished running new cable to all the devices in the garage)
The rack itself has a 10G uplink from my main server closet via OM3 fiber and SR Transceivers. Number 24 is the uplink to the garage
All of the switches are of course on UPS's, so the AP's will never lose power
Interface
This is the interface for the Ruckus Unleashed AP's, its got pretty much every setting you might want, but its quite easy to configure. The nice thing here is that you can stack changes that need a reboot, and not many changes actually need a reboot
As you can see below, I have a few different networks with different settings and different VLAN ID's so I can separate things like IoT devices such as my thermostat and garage door opener
You can see a list of clients and do whatever you wish to do with them. Note that I don't usually have more than 10 devices connected, because everything that can be connected with ethernet, is connected with ethernet. But these AP's can handle hundreds of clients if needed.
Here is a summary of the AP's
As you can see, this is a very nice and simple UI. I never come in here because the AP's "JUST WORK"
Cost
The cost for this was very low. I paid I think around $140 for the Ruckus R510, it was open box off of eBay, and both R310's were left over from Ruckus Cloud WiFi trials at businesses I work for. There is zero licensing cost
Negatives
Honestly there isn't many here that actually matter:
Style: They look dated compared to something like UniFi AP's
Mounting: They use two screws to mount, which honestly is kind of a pain compared to the mounts that other AP's use.
Square: They are square, this means that mounting them you need to be square to the wall or they will look weird, with a round AP this isn't a problem
Why Ruckus over UniFi?
Ruckus is known for Reliable WiFi AP's and great firmware support and stability, so after the trainwreck that was my UniFi AP's, I decided to go Ruckus. Here is a brief rundown of the issues I had with Ubiquiti:
I bought the original UniFi AP which was 2.4GHz only, and it honestly sucked. It would reboot itself randomly every few weeks and drop clients randomly. 3 units later and it still did it. The only thing I can think of is that where I lived at the time was super crowded, so it never like the interferences? Either way everyone's crappy Comcast all-in-one worked great, so why doesn't my "Enterprise" AP? The firmware was (And still is) a mess, they very often break things in production firmware, like they don't really test them. As they got more products, it got worse
I was dumb and didn't listen to myself, and I saw the awesome marketing for the AP Pro which did 5GHz, and I thought all my problems were solved. Wrong. If I had the 2.4GHz band enabled, it would do the same as above. If I disabled it completely it would work okay, but I had 2.4Ghz devices...
Anyway, then I didn't listen to myself again and I got the Unifi AP AC Pro, I figured third time is the charm. Living in an apartment I wasn't supposed to be screwing stuff in the wall, so the fact it used the old mount was a huge benefit, I could just unclip the old one, and clip in the new one. WRONG. They lied, and change the mount. I called support who told me it never changed, and when I made a stink about it on the Forum they quickly changed the website. Ubiquti pretty much didn't care, and all the fanboys pretty much told me to suck it up
The thread is still live...
Aaaaand the problems with rebooting were still there, and the support sucked. So I switched
Not only all that, but roaming never worked well, the speed wasn't great, the latency sucked, the controller made the AP's reboot for every change without any stacking.
The end!