Which Wireless - Ubiquity Unifi or Ruckus?

[m25man]

Before you spend £14 grand more than you need to, take a serious look at your user base.

How many a/g/n clients do you have that can actually take advantage of the proprietary features of Ruckus, Aruba, Meru and a dozens of other vendors.

How many new devices will you deploy in the next 24 months that will be able to utilise AC wave 2 yet alone wave 3?

 

Ubiquiti's non nonsense simple solution has saved so many schools thousands so far.

With AC still evolving and clients still catching up, you can easily afford to put a Unifi system in and throw it away after 18 months if something else takes your fancy without worrying about it!

 

Half of the schools I know that have spent a small fortune on wifi spend the next six months wondering why there £300 laptops still only connect at 64mbps only to find the laptops they bought that have to last 4 yrs only have 1x1 2.4ghz wireless cards!

 

Laugh, I nearly bought my own beer!

 

Meanwhile the wifi salesman drives off with a nice fat commission in his BMW....

 

Fact is, 95% of Primaries don't need anything more sophisticated than Unifi and probably 50% of secondaries will never use many of the "advanced" features promoted by other systems.

 

Your budgets are tight as it is why waste them on tech you can't use?

[Jobos]

I put 6 ap ruckus system in one of my schools 18 months ago. Works great but now they want to extend the coverage but as the system is at the 6 ap limit with the current licence it makes it very expensive to add just one more ap so we just bought a bog standard ap and running it stand alone. Wish now we had gone down the unified route much easier and cheaper to extend the coverage.

[philmills]

I put 6 ap ruckus system in one of my schools 18 months ago. Works great but now they want to extend the coverage but as the system is at the 6 ap limit with the current licence it makes it very expensive to add just one more ap so we just bought a bog standard ap and running it stand alone. Wish now we had gone down the unified route much easier and cheaper to extend the coverage.

 

I'm in the same boat, well I was... We also found that the old six unit Ruckus system won't support the newer Ruckus APS even if we wanted to upgrade those for more powerful ones. I don't like companies who do that kinda thing. IMO its just a legal method of extortion, a business model followed by the likes of Micro$haft, Int3l etc. Ruckus seem to also have a licensing model similar to MS CALS where you pay a licence for each AP. That also stinks...

 

Decided to divide the school into two zones, one using the 6 Ruckus APs and controller, and the other uses 7 new Unifi AP-LR units. Working fine, with a small glitch in the zone where Wifi switches between the two systems, but it doesn't get in the way much since its in our atrium area. I love the Unifi software controller - very easy to use, and unlimited APs. The only downside has been that I can't use my exisiting PoE switches, since the Unifi APs use 24v PoE, not 12v. However Ubiquiti offers PoE 8port switches for little over €100, which ain't bad.

 

Now I'm at a crossroads - government (in my country) is offering 100% funding for upgrading network infrastructure. So I have a chance to go 100% either Ubiquiti or Ruckus. Decisions decisions...

[mrbios]

Just out of curiosity as I'm going to be doing a whole replacement of our 8 year old wireless system next year (forward planning i know, but i could do with a rough figure on my projections for next year).....how much do these systems cost from the likes of ubiquity, ruckus, meru etc? I've only used Aruba thus far, and like i say a very old system with some very old APs, found them to be very expensive. If someone could PM me some details about how much they've paid per AP, licensing etc it'd be much appreciated

[ass17]

We paid with installation planning, 5 year support, 97 APs, 2 controllers, 150 AP Licences, for our ruckus solution total cost £55,000

 

We also quoted Meru but came in at £100,000 for same Ruckus solution above. We made the right decision and has been so far flawless for 2 years.

Edited April 21, 2015 by ass17

[synaesthesia]

Ubiquiti is an easy one as it's self install. The UAP Pro 3 packs are £420. No licensing, controller software is free and will run on anything.

The AC access points are £540 per 3 pack. Will probably be able to knock a bit off those, as they're off the shelf prices.

 

So,comparison with the above post 97 APs would be £17.5k giving the best possible UniFi APs, but it's very much a DIY for support.

Edited April 22, 2015 by synaesthesia

[Dev0n]

I work at a Primary School in Cape Town. We currently have 15 UAP-LR's running. Hardly had any issues.

As for the support, I needed help once before. There support guy helped me via remote support for over 2 hours, and was very good.

So all in all i would highly recommend Ubiquiti, easiest solution if you are looking for nice features at a good price.