Wireless recommendation

[Edu-IT]

So with that stick can you take it anywhere then and manage a set of AP’s? It doesn’t need to be plugged in all the time?

[jmak]

Haven't tried it, but I assume it runs the same software as the standard controller. In which case the APs will continue to work and connect clients, but you'll lose some functionality such as the built in radius authentication and guest portals. I've had APs running at home for months at a time without the controller - they also reboot without needing the controller.

[m25man]

Cost wise, how much different is a Ruckus Unleashed AP, lets say?

 

Twice if not three times the price!

 

An R310 is about £360 the R510 is £560 and an R710 is over £1k so significantly more expensive than all of the Unifi equivalents.

 

These seem to be similar in cost to other tier one products from the likes of Cisco, Aruba etc.

 

Remember, Unleashed is the non Controller version uses a Master Slave system to replicate and provide distributed management similar to Aruba’s Instant and Netgear’s Ensemble mode.

 

There are limits to the number of AP’s that can be managed in this manner but most are easily upgraded to a controller based solution when these are eventually reached but a neat way to get advanced Enterprise Wifi features for a lower capex.

[snagrat]

Ruckus R510 for Education should be closer to £360, probably even cheaper if buying more.

[njc235]

Twice if not three times the price!

 

An R310 is about £360 the R510 is £560 and an R710 is over £1k so significantly more expensive than all of the Unifi equivalents.

 

Not through a VAR worth his salt! e.g.R510 less than £300

[fiza]

Not through a VAR worth his salt! e.g.R510 less than £300

Can you please let me know who sells for that price? Need 50 soon.

[Net-Ctrl]

Twice if not three times the price!

 

An R310 is about £360 the R510 is £560 and an R710 is over £1k so significantly more expensive than all of the Unifi equivalents.

.

 

These prices quoted are all RRP. There are significant discounts available to all EDU clients, so if anyone on here is paying what's quoted here you are being seriously overcharged. Even taking in to account the EDU pricing for Ruckus it will still be more expensive than Ubiq. There are now cheaper ways to buy Ruckus, for example all their controllers are now using an incremental licensing models, so should you need to add a single AP, you can now buy a single AP license which makes it a lot easier to plan ahead. Honestly, it was always a frustration on the old controllers when clients had to add a minimum 25AP increment. There is also the Unleashed solution that has been mentioned. This is up to 25 Aps and follows the master-slave analogy. You pay for a single support contract which supports your entire Unleashed deployment, even those added at a later date. Option three is that you go for a managed WiFi solution, like the one we offer, where we will host your Ruckus points and manage them, supply fixes etc.

 

Again, all methods above will be more expensive than Ubiq. What we can do with Ruckus is do more with less APs. It is very common to see Ruckus require up to 30% fewer APs than other tier one manufacturers. These means lower install costs (less cable/data points required) and lower port/switch requirements. You also get trained engineers on the end of the phone to help should you ever get in to issues. In terms of longevity, we have a lot of clients, hundreds, still using APs they bought 5-6 years ago and had no problems. So there are reasons to use the likes of Ruckus. Ruckus specifically has been through some testing times with acquisitons however it has come out of it all looking pretty good. Arris, current owners, are leaving Ruckus to it. They are seen as a separate business unit. Through previous acqusitions they were bought along with what was the Brocade ICX switch series, now called the Ruckus ICX series. This allows them to be more comparable with the other tier one offerings ie. Cisco/Meru, Aruba/HP. Integration between the two, Ruckus WiFi and ICX switches and should be pretty damn good. So yes, it has been through a times of change, but it has come out the other end pretty unscathed and with a complete switch portfolio.

 

We aren't here to say that "if you need WiFi, you have to go for Ruckus", but, if people are considering Ruckus, then do let us know, we have been a Ruckus partner for 10 years and an EduGeek Sponsor for not far off that. We will offer practical advice and assistance where required, we will work with you to design WiFi for your building, environment and requirement. We won't be as cheap as Ubiq and we never will be, but we will be able to deliver a solution that will keep you going for years to come, we're at the end of the phone should you need support/advice and we get access to the best discounts available due to our partner status within Ruckus.

[AlanD]

Well I'd be going the HD Unify access points...because they support AC2...and therefore have the potential of wider channels, more streams (4x4) and of course MU-MIMO. None of these things are life changing of course. Wireless is wireless....its not a replacement for wired delivery in a classroom environment - regardless of hype. And yes they are more expensive..but not nearly as expensive as the access points from the big names.

[Edu-IT]

Can you please let me know who sells for that price? Need 50 soon.

I’d be interested to know too as that seems incredibly low pricing. On what quantity were you getting that?

[m25man]

I’d be interested to know too as that seems incredibly low pricing. On what quantity were you getting that?

 

There’s always a Delboy somewhere and yes, the prices I posted here are of course the MSRP as this forum is not a flea market and official dealers are free to set their own margin.

Of course, due diligence and 3 quotes needed, that’s what your finance team will insist on.

[Zoom7000]

Meraki all the way for me. I like that we can have it all under one cloud based single pane of glass (WiFi, switches, MDM, CCTV). It's quite literally plug and play and took moments for us to setup and configure. The hardest part of the job was screwing the APs in!

 

For me, it just works. I've finally got a WiFi solution that I've put in and simply forgotten about and it's not given me any issues.

[AlanD]

Meraki brilliant - fantastic web interface...Aerohive wonderful...can be configured in all sorts of useful ways and directly programmed via command line...Ruckus absolutely solid...but they are all a bit like buying Bentley or a Rolls Royce. Not only is the initial cost eye-watering - but the ongoing service costs alone would buy you a second car. Is unify as good - possibly not - it doesn't come with a drinks cabinet nor a VIP lounge while your purchase is serviced...and no supplier is going to come and hold your hand to set it up - well unless you pay them - because there is no money it for them. I think Unify is what might be described as a market disrupter - because it doesn't come with frills...and stuff you never really needed......but it is enterprise quality - despite what competitors say - and does all the stuff you want in a school..... without ongoing annual charges...and at half the initial cost or less.

[tdh1987]

I’d be interested to know too as that seems incredibly low pricing. On what quantity were you getting that?

 

I'm currently negotiating with Switchshop for our R510's. The price is getting close to £300 each. I've just send my evaluation unit back. I was thoroughly impressed with it

[fiza]

Does anyone have a spec that they have used to give to potential suppliers? The wireless solution must have this, this and this?

Due to the cost involved I need to put together a tender document to send out to suppliers to get pricing but don't really know what it should include.

 

If anyone has a copy they could share that would be really helpful.

[njc235]

You will know what you want reagrding coverage and density. You may want a physical controller or a VM based one. You might need cabling to AP positions. You might not know where the AP positions are so you might want a pre-site survey. You will want vendor support for 1,3, or 5 years. You will probably already know whether you need 2x2,3x3, 4x4 etc. You should really have a discussion with a VAR or even a pre-sales visit

[leegcvcc]

Aerohive has been a joy here with all the different requirements with different VLANs, different access needs, different authentication requirements. Support has been fabulous from LAN3 throughout.

[Norphy]

Aerohive has been a nightmare here with access points crashing at random, not taking configurations without having factory resets done on them, not being powerful enough to do the tasks expected of them, with captive portals randomly not working and more besides. I am thoroughly looking forward to ripping them all out and putting something worth having in.

[simpsonj]

Aerohive has been a joy here with all the different requirements with different VLANs, different access needs, different authentication requirements. Support has been fabulous from LAN3 throughout.

 

Exactly the same here.

 

It's not been absolutely perfect, but I rarely worry about WiFi here, and the issues I've got are most likely caused by the wired infrastructure, rather than Aerohive.

[njc235]

 

What sort of problems do you have?

[leegcvcc]

Aerohive has been a nightmare here with access points crashing at random, not taking configurations without having factory resets done on them, not being powerful enough to do the tasks expected of them, with captive portals randomly not working and more besides. I am thoroughly looking forward to ripping them all out and putting something worth having in.

That surprises me. Rock solid here, not one AP has failed in 3 years. I don't use all Aerohive AP features though as use dedicated Windows RADIUS VM's and Windows certificate servers, Windows DHCP etc, so all the AP's do is wireless basically although it's fairly complex I'd say.

[brougham]

Do at least talk to meru.

 

Their buy-back prices for replacing with new meru kit is really high. The cost differential between new meru and new other meant we stayed with meru..

[fiza]

Do Ruckus have a buy-back policy on old kit?

[AlanD]

Aerohive has been a nightmare here with access points crashing at random, not taking configurations without having factory resets done on them, not being powerful enough to do the tasks expected of them, with captive portals randomly not working and more besides. I am thoroughly looking forward to ripping them all out and putting something worth having in.

 

I can never understand how a school - or a business should have a complaint like this. Frankly (assuming you are paying for cloud subscription/support) Aerohive should be rushing out their best engineers with flowers (for the wife) and chocolates and offering you money back if they fail to fix it in 6 hours. You pay an eye-watering annual charge - so demand something for it. Make sure to change your supplier to someone else that does Aerohive. Scream louder - because clearly you are not being heard.

 

As for "not powerful enough to do the tasks expected of them"... well to be honest I partly blame you if that is the case. I would have wanted to be confident that was being proposed by a supplier would actually do the job. All too often....suppliers read the specification...and interpret it rather too liberally. They read "Supports up to 500 clients".....and " speeds of over 1Gb/s" ...and schools think they are going to replace desktop suites of computers with laptops. Remember that those high speeds are only deliverable when using a wide channels (160MHz) and chances are (a) your clients don't support that (b) proximity of other access points means you need to use narrow channels © large numbers of clients means a collision domain that will decimate you traffic speeds (over 20 clients). Then there is the claim that MU-MIMO delivers to 4 clients at once...it kind of does...but actual real world throughput is only around 20% more...(its only 80% more in a theoretically perfect world because remember its only half duplex delivery)..and multiple streams which might raise the notional UDP transmit speed to x2 or even x4 (I bet you don't have any of those as client devices) while making the numbers look great in windows connection speed and AP connection speed - doesn't turn out to actually deliver such data rates....which are again only around 20% more - with diminishing returns as you add streams.

 

One access point in One classroom (yes I know there are claims that access points don't need to be deployed that densely.....but they will if you intend to deliver useful speeds to adjacent classrooms all with devices/laptops) is probably a good starting point. And they need to be in the centre of the classroom ceiling. Out the corridor through a wall and the benefits of multiple streams, Mu_Mimo, high MCS values and the rest become academic - because those only work in extremely high signal to noise ratio circumstances - which is around 3 to 5m of air (no bodies or wall in the way)....yes even thin walls can be surprisingly dense to 5GHz waves....all you will get is 54Mb/s shared between 30 devices...with 25% loss for collision domain....

 

Yes if you discover that you can use a wider 80MHz channel by taking one access point away from a block of classrooms - then you can start to reduce that number...but even multiple 80MHz channels depend on DFS/wether radar channels being free - and noisy clients and accesspoint often give rise to false detection so thos channels effectively stop getting used as the day progresses.

 

I use Aerohive - and they are fine...(although I don't use their cloud subscription....just use command line programming...). But if I had to start again I'd be looking really closely at Unify.

[Norphy]

To be clear, this is an environment I’ve inherited, not one that I specified. I wouldn’t have considered a controllerless system for a system the size of ours. It hasn’t been planned and as far as I can tell, no surveys were ever taken. My job’s previous incumbent’s idea of wireless troubleshooting appears to have been “wireless not working? Chuck in another access point” so you can imagine how badly it’s set up. That said, it doesn’t excuse a lot of the problems that we’ve been having.

 

When I say “not powerful enough to do the task”, I don’t mean in terms of signal strength, I’m talking about the amount of CPU grunt required to do other things such as RADIUS and Bonjour forwarding. We’ve had to farm these roles out to external servers.

 

Aerohive (or the company that we get our support from) should be coming out with steaks, flowers, chocolates and big sloppy kisses, I completely agree but so far they’ve been pretty useless, instead preferring to blame everything for our cabling infrastructure, the amount of power being delivered by our switches, us having LLDP-MED enabled, the bracket on the back of the AP being screwed on too tightly and more nonsense along those lines. The company we get support from have passed our issues onto Aerohive and they said the same crap. We are less than impressed with either company.

 

We don’t use the cloud controller, we have an on-site HiveManager. There is no way in hell I’m going to configure more than 300 access points via a CLI!

[AlanD]

 

We don’t use the cloud controller, we have an on-site HiveManager. There is no way in hell I’m going to configure more than 300 access points via a CLI!

 

300 APs...ok...that’s a serious implementation...I thought our 100 APs were plenty...and a script isn’t that bad..because you can automate its distribution...but I agree it wouldn’t be a solution I would recommend....but it is cheap!

 

We don’t use the aerohive radius...we let our smoothwall handle that...and it handles our dhcp and dns for wireless. So I can’t comment on how well..or badly the APs might do it. I’ve always rather liked the autonomous capability of the Aerohive APs to fully function in the absence of a connection to any controller/hivemanager....but perhaps that communication is part of the problem for you.

 

And we don’t use the bonjour capability either...never really thought bonjour has sufficient granular layers to control which printers appear on which devices..so we use QR codes with printer manufacturers Apps..and some rules in smoothwall to control permissions to printer vlan.

 

But...I would have expected all that to work...universities probably have larger implementations...but yes possibly off load radius.

 

But ..I would still be holding the suppliers hands to the flames....because they need to earn their support costs...it’s not money for nothing...and Aerohive themselves need to back them up...and that may cost them money...especially if they don’t have competently trained staff to narrow down and identify what is going wrong for you. I assume you have raised this on Aerohive community site and making lots of noise there. Annual costs for 300 APs must be thousands of pounds...and I bet your predecessor paid for several years upfront...which you less leaverage...but you could you usefully start to make noises about taking proceedings against the company...

 

I assume you are hosting the controller on a VM and...you have checked it’s been given plenty of resources...?

 

Have you tried ...turning off layer 7 stuff ..which we don’t use because it we think it’s better done with smoothwall at the perimeter..so don’t see the point of doing it at every AP?

 

And we don’t use Aerohive’s captive portal either..again that’s pushed to the smoothwall perimeter....because it’s smoothwall that needs to know the user...couldn’t care much if AP knows who it is or not.

 

Ah.. you mention power. We do find power demands critical. Yes, all manufacturers claim their AP is 802.11 compatible...but being compatible often means the AP is limping along...especially the 3 and 4 stream, multi Ethernet APs. We find our APs randomly reset unless we up the power on the poe switches...in fact we set ours to 802.1at...and while they don’t use 30W they must just trip over the 15W. Maybe this is somewhere to start...get some inline “at” injectors see if they help.

Edited March 20, 2018 by AlanD