Recommended wireless AP for 400 users office

Fri Jan 30 12:07:10 UTC 2015

Manuel MarÃn <mmg at transtelco.net> writes:

> I was wondering if you can recommend or share your experience with APs that
> you can use in locations that have 300-500 users. I friend recommended me
> Ruckus Wireless, it would be great if you can share your experience with
> Ruckus or with a similar vendor.  My experience with ubiquity for this type
> of requirement was not that good.

I have had a pair of Ruckus R700s at the house for a short while now
(hey, they haven't been out that long).

They work fine without a controller, at least in WPA2-PSK mode with a
few VLANs.  Haven't seen if Enterprise works without the controller or
not, so if you care you might want to check.  For an annual fee,
Ruckus offers a "cloud controller" too as opposed to their physical
box controllers; this is worthy of consideration depending upon your
situation.

Software upgrades were pretty straightforward.

The R700 has a CLI, but I haven't tried doing anything particular with
it so I can't offer any thoughts there.  Those running with a
controller (the "expected" mode of operation) will never touch the
individual APs anyway, so I'd expect the CLI might be a little
disappointing.  The web UI is thoughtfully laid out and was easy to
use.

Management VLAN can be separate from the customer traffic VLANs and
they work fine with my slightly demented mix of tagged/untagged
traffic.  The caveat here is that if you were thinking of just tossing
everything in one VLAN without any separation whatsoever, there
doesn't seem to be a good way to filter access to the management
interface.  Then again, it's https/ssh (http and telnet are available
but off by default, hooray!) so you may not care.  The sshd and web
server are dropbear and GoAhead-Webs respectively.

Overall I've found the R700s very stable and been pleased with them.
They're a bit spendy, but you absolutely get what you pay for.  At the
other end of the spectrum is the Ubiquiti and Mikrotik kit, which I
also love, but for a completely different use case and budget.

I would recommend Ruckus without hesitation.

My $0.02.

-r