Ruckus with large numbers of iPads?

[reggiep]

Hi All, We currently are happily running a Ruckus Zone Director 1000 with 20 APs to cover our whole school. This has worked fine for about 5 trollies of 30 laptops/netbooks. The only issues we have had have been with some samsung netbooks rather than the wireless.

Anyway one of our future plans may be to issue iPads to a year group and the staff, so possibly 190 ipads throughout the school.

My thoughts are that our current install may struggle, and then when the following year adds another 150 ipads and so on we might grind to a halt.

Has anybody else already gone through this or are going through this?

Can anyone suggest what wireless would be suitable for this sort of set up?

 

Thanks

[neilmac]

Have a read of this and talk to your Ruckus reseller.

 

New Independent Wi-Fi Stress Testing Reveals Breaking Points for the Industry

 

if you don't have access to a reseller let me know.

 

NM

Edited September 24, 2013 by neilmac

[reggiep]

With all that money to burn surly you could just throw more ruckus APs at it?

 

As you know there are many different bonfires to throw our money on, but the management don't always let us throw it on to the right one!

[neilmac]

We have some important things to think about when designing a network for capacity.

 

1) Work out what the required THROUGHPUT rate per device. What type of traffic are you going to run and how many SIMULTANEOUS users do you want to support.

 

2) What type of device are you deploying ? Do you know what data rates they support ?

 

3) What are your security and roaming considerations ?

 

4) What us the growth plan for the network - how much spare capacity needs to be planned.

 

With these figures, we can run a simulation to see what the client performance would be like. That tell you how many access points you will need, then you have to work out how to place them in a small space so they don't interfere with each other - this is where predictive survey software comes in to play.

 

If you have figures I will run a sim for you and post the results.

 

NM

[SYNACK]

More waps and make sure you are on the latest controller and ap firmware, the ios wireless stack is junk and 'sticky' or so I gathered when talking to some of the ruckus engineering people. Despite their unfounded love for apple stuff they have had to tweak their controllers to deal with ios devices that hang on and won't roam, shouting to a long lost ap and polluting channels. I think that some time back there was also an issue with excess negotiation attempt but I think this has mostly been sorted by vendors patching around it. Never the less the waps have to work much harder with ijunk than they do with laptops, not just because of the implementation but also the tiny junk Ariels in them, you need way more signal strength for those devices to work so an area that works fine with a laptop may be completely unreachable via something with a smaller and much worse designed antenna.

[nokem]

Using Aruba with 3 controllers, 135 AP's and 700 iPads. Can check on controller details if you are interested. Have pretty much zero issues, good throughput and almost 100% coverage of the school. Edited October 2, 2013 by nokem

[nokem]

Well while obviously you will be using a lot less APs I can certainly recommend that the Aruba performance with iOS devices is solid.

[SYNACK]

Well while obviously you will be using a lot less APs I can certainly recommend that the Aruba performance with iOS devices is solid.

 

Just to be clear, I have not had issues with ios devices on a ruckus network or an Aruba one, I was just pointing out that due to their behaviour they put more load on any wireless system. If you have the appropriate amount of waps then either system should work for you.