Aerohive vs Ruckus on large site 100% coverage

[psydii]

Has anyone got recent experence to share regarding aerohive or ruckus wireless networks?

Use case is that wifi would be the primary access medium, with a base load of over 300 simultaneous users, with up to 400 more from time to time. Potential for 1700 people to be on the system (given smart phones are becoming ubiquitous)

Other factors of interest:

• Heavy use of Apple Airplay.
  
• Lots of BYOD.
  
• Lots of laptop trolleys (I know, quaint. But done right, effective)
  
• Lots of school owned iPads
  
• Lots of webex stuff and VOIP.
  
• 
  

 

To give an idea, we have about 120 APs deployed to cover the site at the moment.

[foofighterjim]

Without knowing your site it is hard to say but as a generalisation I would suggest that Ruckus will give you the same coverage as Aerohive but with fewer APs. The question then is would the coverage of fewer APs give you the throughput you require?

 

The down side to Ruckus APs is that the warranty costs extra, whereas it is factored into the cost with Aerohive (if you care about warranty anyway). I was told by a couple of Ruckus resellers to just buy a few extra APs and have them on the shelf if one should fail, that did not sit well with me. Another benefit of Aerohive is that the SSID keys are held on the AP so authentication happens at the edge, obviously if you are using RADIUS this is not the case.

[Quackers]

We use Ruckus with heavy AirPlay use. (Every classroom) Plus we have a 1:1 device deployment is Years 9,10 & 11. Normally 300-450 users on at any one point spread over 50 AP's. It performs well.

 

The Apple TV's are wired in not using the wireless, but the teachers MacBooks and iPads are using the Ruckus wireless to Airplay.

 

My only annoyance with Ruckus and its a big one is the Zone Director software. We had it all running great back in 2011 with the 7363 AP's, and when they bring out a new model you have to upgrade the software on the director to support the new APs which you can only get if you have a support contract. Add to that i am led to believe the version I'm on now is the last one to support our only 4 year old AP's and i will have to change them all if i want newer APs in the future because newer APs will require the new software which won't support the older AP's.