Ruckus Wireless Reviews

We have two customers where we implemented on-premises solutions with Ruckus Wireless, making use of Ruckus Unleashed and access point models R510, R610, and R320. 

Our one customer is a small-medium business and they have 50 to 100 employees, and the most recent solution that we implemented was for a government client where we installed 17 access points.

In the years that we have worked with Ruckus, we have found it to be a very comfortable solution for both my own company and our customers. Ruckus enables us to give organizations better wireless access to their network, and can support many devices.

With Ruckus, alongside some Aruba products, we are able to more easily solve communication problems in the companies we work with.

For me, the most valuable features are good integration with the customer's existing network and the ease of deployment and configuration. Ruckus products are also easy to learn to manage and deploy for not only our own staff, but also for the IT workers in the customer's organization.

Ruckus products, overall, have a wide range of useful features, however not all customers have the budget to buy a corporate Wi-Fi solution. Most of the time, it's far too expensive for our clients to consider going with Ruckus, and they might like to see cheaper solutions in the Ruckus range.

I have been using Ruckus Wireless for five years now.

Ruckus products are very, very stable. We have clients that can go one or two years with no issues at all, and with other clients we tend to see only minor issues with the wireless network.

Up until 25 access points, things are very simple. When you get to more than 25 access points, you need a controller and it is sometimes an issue for clients because they generally don't want to spend more buying the controller. 

The support from Ruckus Wireless is acceptable. When we open a support case, they normally respond in a short amount of time.

The setup is easy. 

Our implementation process is very quick, and it normally takes only one or two days. It's especially quick to implement when we already have all the equipment and cabling ready to connect and configure on the customer's premises.

Not all of our clients can afford a fully corporate solution like Ruckus. But for many of our clients, pricing is the only factor that prevents them from choosing Ruckus, as we have found Ruckus to be a very suitable and reliable solution for integrating wireless access points to a company's network.

Normally, here in Medellín, Columbia where we work, the clients consider Ubiquiti or TP-Link first because they're cheaper. 

Ruckus incorporates the latest technology in their products and they are indeed very fast performance-wise.

I would rate Ruckus Wireless a nine out of ten.

We are a big church, so we have to cover a 100,000 square foot building plus another 3,000 square foot building. We have Ruckus Wireless in two locations. We are on Zone Director 1200.

Our other office is running over a VPN, so it keeps connected to the Zone Director via VPN for any information that is needed, but it still works. The nice part is that they work on the internet connection that is local to the office that they are in. They work independently. Nothing comes through the controller. They just use the controller to authenticate and know what is going on with the unit.

Its roaming capabilities and the fact that we can have redundant backup controllers are the most valuable. There is a backup controller that is heart beated to the primary. It is also fairly easy to install.

Its interface could be a little bit more user friendly.

I have been using Ruckus Wireless for six or seven years.

Its stability has been acceptable.

I have contacted them. So far, so good. There are no major issues with them. They have been pretty responsive.

We used SonicPoint, which is with SonicWall. The only reason for switching was that it wasn't their main thing. They were more of a firewall, and they had it as a secondary thing. We needed something that was much more robust with more capabilities per access point. We have 250 or more people on an access point.

The initial setup was easy.

We paid for a three-year contract last year. I am not sure about what we paid. It is certainly less expensive than Meraki.

I would advise looking at the cloud version. If we had not renewed our licensing for the standalone, we would probably look at going with the cloud solution because it is easy to support.

I would rate Ruckus Wireless an eight out of ten.

We use it for public Wi-Fi services.

Ruckus Wireless improved our organization's operations compared to other competitors like Cisco, HP Arbor, and Extreme Networks. We ran pilot tests and assessed functionality and stability over four months. Ultimately, we chose Ruckus.

I find signal combining and team forming in Ruckus Wireless most valuable. Signal Combining boosts signal strength and coverage, while Team Forming improves network performance by working together effectively. These features have greatly helped our organization.

One area where Ruckus Wireless could improve is its technical support. It needs to better handle technical issues and keep up with current technology standards.

I have been using Ruckus Wireless for two and a half years.

The solution is very stable. I would give it a nine out of ten for stability. Ruckus Wireless was the most stable option among major Wi-Fi products like Cisco and Extreme Networks in our testing. 

Ruckus Wireless is very scalable. I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. Anyone can access Ruckus Wi-Fi services whenever they receive the Ruckus Wi-Fi signal nearby, as the access points are operational 24/7, 365 days a year.

I would rate the technical support a seven out of ten. It definitely needs some improvement.

Neutral

I would rate the easiness of the initial setup a nine out of ten. It is fairly simple. It took approximately 20 minutes to install the outdoor access point.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. I'm very satisfied with it.

We primarily use the solution for its performance, compatibility, and general capabilities. We do a lot of schools, colleges, large civic centers, large arenas, etc. That kind of stuff. We know how to deploy this so that the clients get great client connectivity.

In terms of COVID, we've deployed external access points to the outside of a lot of the buildings. These are very weather-resistant, all-metal enclosures. The students have been able to do assignments and schoolwork and that kind of stuff from the parking lots of the schools. They can drive up in their car, get their assignments, or do work that they need to while they're connected to the school. It made social distancing in this way pretty seamless as everything was already set up on their laptops. Most of the schools are what they call the one-to-one initiative, where every student gets a laptop and they've been able to work through COVID from their cars in parking lots when they needed to be at the school for something. It's really benefited a lot of the schools to be able to do that.

The performance of the product is amazing.

The ease of configuration that's on offer is very good.

The product is very compatible with other solutions.

The guest onboarding is so simple. We can onboard guests really easily. Each guest that connects has a pre-shared key that they get which are all unique. We have some great control over the guest and corporate traffic. We can control how much bandwidth a guest user gets versus a corporate user, and who gets priority on there. 

Ruckus is way ahead of the game on a lot of stuff like Wi-Fi 6. They're already rolling out the second version of Wi-Fi 6, which is a huge improvement over even Wi-Fi 5. The way wireless started is you had 802.11b, 802.11a, then 802.11g and 802.11n, then 802.11ac, then AC wave to 802.11ax which is the first version of Wi-Fi 6. The next version of Wi-Fi 6 is rolling out already.

The product has some very awesome patents on their radios and their antennas and antenna patterns and how their signaling works. That's why nobody can touch them. If they go head to head with anybody. They blow Cisco and Aruba out of the water and even Mist for radio plant connectivity. On top of that, they have very good engineering. If I ever need help with engineering stuff, I can call on them. The company does a really good job, which is why we've stayed with them.

They're leaders in what they're doing. I don't know what they can do to improve what they're doing currently. 

The cost could be slightly improved. It's not on the low end, and it's not in the high end. It's in that middle area, which can be a deciding factor between someone going with this solution versus another one.

They've got a rotation or a life expectancy of about four years for the radio. Not that radio is going to die right hten. I've got some that are way older than that, that the customers are still using. However, they take them and they end the life of them at four years. Any of their wireless products are end of life by year four. Most of it's because technology has changed so much that those old videos can't do stuff that is now available for PCs to connect or phones to connect to that kind of stuff. 

What they do is they force you into a Cloud controller. We've got a couple of them. If I've got a Cloud controller there and it's on version 5.1, and I want to go to version 5.2, bdue to the fact that I need to support the new radios coming out, I can't if I have some older radios on that controller. I can't upgrade that controller to the latest software to support the new radios as I've got some end of life radios on there that go into life when I upgrade the software. They need to be able to allow us to keep some of the older products on the Cloud controllers or any of their controllers longer, and just start supporting the new controllers. They force you into an upgrade unnecessarily.

We have some customers that have just a few APs. There are some small businesses that don't want to, or don't need to upgrade their controllers and they're crushing their access points. For us to be able to work with the latest access points, we've got to upgrade our controller, however, we can't. That bites us every year. We'll have customers that have APs that are going end of life that still work fine, but we can't manage them anymore.

I know the reasoning behind it is it could be security features or it's something that the access points don't support that newer devices do. They'll support this new Wi-Fi 6 coming out, however, I can't run the same types of radios on this particular controller software anymore. That kind of puts me off a little bit, however, that's the only thing that the company has done that's made me mad.

I've been using the solution for the past six years.

The stability of the product is rock solid. We haven't had any issues at all.

The solution is extremely scalable. I can have up to three controllers with each one housing 10,000 APS. I can have a cluster of controllers controlling 30,000 different APS. I don't have anything that big. One is close to a thousand and that's the biggest I have. Still, it's nice to be able to build in more redundancy. 

As a Ruckus partner, I've got access to Ruckus. I've got access to tech support, and it makes things a lot easier for the end-users and businesses I work with. If they have an issue, they can come directly to me or they can go directly to Ruckus, it doesn't matter. I'll be happy to help them. If I can't answer the question or get them fixed, then we'll get with tech support. I don't call tech support very often. Maybe once a year, if that. They make a good product and offer good training. Once you learn it, it's pretty easy to manage. 

We used to have Cisco's products for one or two years. I don't know the last time I had to turn in an RMA for a Ruckus radio. They're a solid product.

I've been doing implementations for a long time. If it's brand new to the system, like any system, it can be fairly complex. However, they have great documentation on their website on how to set it up. If a client needs complexity, however, they need help. That's where I come in.

I can go in and configure things securely for guest access and BYOB devices and corporate laptops with 802.1X. I have a stand-alone AP, I just got one office with one AP. I don't need it to be controlled by anything. If I've got one or two SSID, it can still be configured. It's just that you're doing it on the AP or, alternatively, they have what's called Unleashed, which is controller-less. The AP is the controller that can do up to 50 APs all controlled by one AP. If that AP was to die, it doesn't matter, that configuration is saved on all of them. 

There are several different interfaces you may run into, to be able to configure everything. However, they're all very similar in how they work and react. The full controller has much more capability than Unleashed and at least has more capability on the stand-alone. In any case, it's all well documented, and all straightforward.

In terms of deployment times, we figure for AP it's an hour and a half, so you can just figure in that as the base amount of time you need for each AP and that includes configuration and installation. Therefore, if you have 20 APs, it's about 30 hours for 25 APs and that's setting up the controller virtual, or Cloud-based, setting up the AP, the SSIDs, passwords, 802.1X., and then physically mounting them.

The solution definitely offers my clients a good ROI after they implement it.

They don't really need to be cheaper. They're not the most expensive, and they're not the least expensive. They're right there in the middle.

We're a reseller as well as a customer.

We're running the latest software. We deploy through a controller and we use 802.1X. There're multiple ways to deploy to customers. There's a cloud controller, for example. We typically do a virtual controller on their systems.

If a company is new to Ruckus, it's best to work with a partner. You need somebody that knows what they're doing, and knows what questions to ask so that you're getting the right information. When I go to do an implementation, I've got a list of 50 different questions. I'll ask somebody, what about this? What about this? What about this? It will help with the implementation process if someone has a complete view of what to ask for and what to do.

You get what you pay for. People will throw in Linksys, and this other stuff. If you're a business, say you're a coffee shop and you have 50 customers sitting there. You want all of them to get the same performance all the time. I want to make sure everybody gets an equal amount of time without anybody getting any interruptions.

With Linksys and Ubiquiti and all these other brands, you don't get that. When it comes to the head-to-head competition, the Ruckus far out-shines them. Ten to one, you just can't compete. When they say it's going to do something, it does it. They don't put documentation out that is misleading. If it says it'll do 1,024 clients it'll do 1,024 clients. If it says it'll do 4.3 gigabytes, it'll do 4.3 gigabytes. It's great.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I mostly use this solution for Office Wi-Fi, but also for hotspots.

I like the controller more informative and easier to set up. They're a bit expensive, but the device performance is amazing.

There is room for improvement in the pricing. It could be improved. 

I have been using this solution for five years. I've used versions from the R7363 up to the R730 of the R510, R610, and R600 series, up to the RCV.

It is a very stable solution.

It's scalable with a very good range. On the deployment, I have a hotspot with about maybe 2,0000 users every day. I also used it in some enterprises and homes as standard stand alone units. 

The setup is a little bit complex, but it's slightly easier than UniFi's original setup. When growing the network, it's easier. Working with individual units is easy because I can get more information from them.

The deployment is really, and took just a couple of hours.

The deployment was done in-house.

Basically, set up the controller. Once the controller is set up, every unit connected to the system shows up in the system, and it's just adopted. A little bit of fine-tuning, and it's good to go.

Maintenance is really easy. I just have three technicians, on a permanent basis. But for tasks like cabling, I run all those myself. I use temporary staff when needed.

It is worth the money we are paying for this solution.

The pricing is expensive. We pay yearly license. There are no additional costs to the standard license. 

In my experience, I rate Ruckus almost a ten out of ten. It's really the best solution I've worked with.

I would suggest to go for it. It is a really good product.

We primarily use the solution for its performance, compatibility, and capability.

We do a lot of schools, some colleges, large civic centers, large arenas, that kind of stuff. We know how to deploy this so that they get great client connectivity and have easy guest onboarding. We can onboard guests really easily. Each guest that connects has a pre-shared key that they get. They're all unique. We have some great control over guest traffic, and great control over say, corporate traffic. We control how much bandwidth a guest user gets versus a corporate user, and who gets priority on the network.

When COVID happened, we deployed external access points to the outside of a lot of the buildings that are very weather-resistant, all-metal enclosures, and their students have been able to do assignments and schoolwork and that kind of stuff from the parking lots of the schools. They can drive up in their car, get their assignments, or do work that they need to while they're connected to the school. It made it pretty seamless as everything was already set up on their laptops. Most of the schools are what they call the one-to-one initiatives, where every student gets a laptop. They've been able to work through COVID from their cars in parking lots when they need to be at the school for something. It's really benefited a lot of the schools to be able to do that.

The solution has an easy configuration.

The performance is good.

Ruckus is way ahead of the game on a lot of stuff, like Wi-Fi 6. They're already rolling out their second version of Wi-Fi 6 which is a huge improvement over even Wi-Fi 5. The way wireless started is you had 802.11b, 802.11a, then 802.11g and 802.11n, then 802.11ac, then AC wave 2, 802.11ax, which is Wi-Fi 6, the first version. Now, the next version of Wi-Fi 6 is rolling out already.

These guys are an engineering company that has some very awesome patterns on how their radios work and their antennas and antenna patterns, and how their signaling and stuff works. That's why nobody can touch them. If they go head-to-head with anybody, they blow Cisco and Aruba out of the water, and Mist, for radio client connectivity. 

They compete head-to-head with all the big names.

As far as what they can improve, that's a good question, as they're leaders in what they do in my opinion. I don't know what they can do to improve what they're doing currently. 

They're not the most expensive, and they're not the least expensive. They're right there in the middle. Pricing might be a deciding factor for some companies. If they were cheaper, they might land more customers.

They've got a rotation or a life expectancy of about four years for the radio. Not that the radio is going to die. I've got some that are way older than that that the customers are still using. However, they take them and they end the life of them at four years.

Many of their wireless products are end of life by year four. That's most of it as technology has changed so much that those old radios can't do stuff that is now available for PCs to connect or phones to connect to, etc. What they do is they force you into upgrading. We've got a couple of cloud controllers. If I've got a cloud controller that is in the same version 5.1, and I want to go to version 5.2, due to the fact that I need to support the new radios coming out, I can't if I have some older radios on that controller. They make it so I can't upgrade that controller to the latest software to support the new radios as I've got some end of life radios on there that go end of life when I upgrade the software.

They need to be able to allow us to keep some of the older products on our cloud controllers or any of their controllers longer and just start supporting the new controllers. They force you into an upgrade unnecessarily. We have some customers that have just a few APs, small businesses that don't want to or don't need to upgrade their controllers. For us to be able to work with their latest access points, we've got to upgrade their controller, but we can't as it's got some older ones on it, and that bites us every year.

I know the reasoning behind it. It's because it could be security features or it's something that the access points don't support that newer devices do, like your laptops and cell phones. They'll support this new Wi-Fi 6 coming out, yet I can't run the same types of radios on this particular controller software anymore. They can't have both. That kind of puts me off a little bit. But that's the only thing that the company's done that's made me mad.

There's a lot of new features coming out of Wi-Fi 6 that they don't even have the chips in the phones for yet. 

I've been using the solution for six years or so at this point.

The solution is very stable. We don't have any issues with it at all.

The solution is very scalable. I can have up to three controllers, each one housing 10,000 APs. Therefore, I can have a cluster of controllers controlling 30,000 different APs. I don't have anything that big. The closest one is close to 1000, however, still, it's nice to be able to have redundancy. I can build in more redundancy if I need to. 

As a Ruckus partner, I've got access to Ruckus. I've got access to tech support and it makes things a lot easier for our end-users and the businesses that I work with. If they have an issue they can come directly to me, or they can go directly to Ruckus. It doesn't matter. I'll be happy to help them. If I can't answer the question or get them fixed, then we'll deal with tech support. I don't call tech support very often. Maybe once a year, if that. They make a good product and have good training. Once you learn it, it's pretty easy to manage. We used to have Cisco's products die on us every one or two years. I don't know the last time I had to turn in an RMA for a Ruckus radio. They have a solid product.

I've been doing it a long time, so for me, the setup is straightforward. If a person is a brand new to the system, like any system, it can be fairly complex. However, they have great documentation on their website on how to set it up. To do very complex things, that takes somebody who knows what they are doing. I've got a very complex scenario that I need to set up then that's what I get paid for - to help set that stuff up. I will go in and configure things securely for guest access and BYOD devices and corporate laptops with 802.1x. 

You can have a controller version, or it could be a controller-less. I have a standalone AP, I just got one office with one AP, I don't need it to be controlled by anything. I've got one or two SSIDs, and that can still be configured. It's just that you're doing it on the AP or they have what's called Unleashed, which is controller-less. The AP is the controller and that can do up to 50 APs all controlled by one AP. But if that AP was to die, it doesn't matter that configuration is saved on all of them and the next one in line will just take over as the controller AP. There are several different interfaces you may run into to be able to configure the things, however, they're all very similar in how they work and react. The full controller has much more capability than Unleashed, and Unleashed has more capability than the standalone. 

In terms of deployment, we figure for an AP it's about an hour and a half. That's for both configuration and installation. Therefore, if you have 20 APs, it's about 30 hours for 25 APs. That's setting up the controller, virtual or cloud-based, setting up the APs, your SSIDs, passwords, 802.1x, and then physically mounting them.

Our clients definitely get a return on investment when they purchase Ruckus.

We are a customer and reseller.

I'm using the latest version of the solution.

Through a controller, we use 802.1x. There are multiple ways to deploy it to customers, including via a cloud controller. We typically do a virtual controller on our client's systems.

I would advise, if a company is new to Ruckus, to work with a partner. It's important to have somebody that knows what they're doing, and knows what questions to ask so that you're getting the right information. When I go to do an implementation, I've got a list of 50 different questions. I'll ask somebody, what about this? What about this? What about this?

You get what you pay for. People will throw in Lynksys and this other home stuff up. I'll say, that's great. If you're a business, it won't cut it. Say you're a coffee shop and I've got 50 customers sitting side. you want all of them to get the same performance all the time. If I've got three people, four people in that coffee shop streaming videos or watching movies or whatever it might be, I want to make sure everybody gets an equal amount of time without anybody getting any interruptions. With Linksys and Ubiquiti and all these other brands, you don't get that. In head to head competition, Ruckus far outshines them 10 to one. You just can't compete. When they say it's going to do something, it'll do it. They don't put documentation out that is misleading. If it says it'll do 1,024 clients it'll do 1,024 clients. If it says it'll do 4.3 gigabytes, it'll do 4.3 gigabytes.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

What I like best about Ruckus Wireless is that it's a controller-based product, so it's easy to configure.

An area for improvement in Ruckus Wireless is automating its guest WiFi access function. Currently, the product requires token generation, so it would be better if there's a portal for the guest to log in and get the password rather than the IT team needing to give passwords to guests.

A minor area for improvement in Ruckus Wireless is its technical support.

I want a built-in RADIUS server on Ruckus Wireless in the next release, as that would add some value to the product.

My company has been using Ruckus Wireless for five years.

Regarding stability, I rate Ruckus Wireless as eight out of ten.

Ruckus Wireless is scalable. Every controller has a limit on the number of APs, and my company's controller can handle one thousand APs. Still, my company only uses two hundred APs, so Ruckus Wireless is a scalable product.

My rating for Ruckus Wireless technical support is eight out of ten. It has a small room for improvement.

Positive

My company purchased Aruba Wireless for a new location based on Gartner recommendations. My company also made a technical comparison and found that Aruba Wireless is the number one product in the world, which is why the company is leaning toward it versus Ruckus Wireless.

Ruckus Wireless has a simple initial setup.

An integrator deployed Ruckus Wireless for my company, but my company is responsible for maintaining the product.

Regarding pricing, Ruckus Wireless is a five out of ten. Though it's cheaper than Aruba Wireless, pricing for Ruckus Wireless, when you look at its functionality, could be more affordable.

My company has Ruckus Wireless switching and AP products.

In the company, about one thousand five hundred people use Ruckus Wireless.

Four network engineers maintain the product within the company.

Ruckus Wireless is a seven on a scale of one to ten.

I'm recommending the product to others.

My company is a Ruckus Wireless customer.

My organization is a college, so we just want to make sure we have a reliable Wi-Fi connection for the students.

We are using the latest version of Ruckus. It is deployed on-premise.

Right now, there are over 2,000 people using this solution.

We were in a bad shape, especially with remote teaching and things like that, so now everything's all right because of the reliability of Ruckus.

The most valuable feature is that this solution is reliable.

We use this solution in a certain way, and it works very well. So, I don't expect it to do a lot more, but to do what it's doing probably better or faster. But it's not a problem with the features; it's more the operations.

I've been using this solution for the past 12 months.

The stability is fine. We haven't had any problems.

We haven't had any issues with the scalability.

Technical support is good. I would rate it a 4 out of 5. There's still some improvement that could be made.

We have also used Cisco. We switched because of many reasons, but staying with Cisco would have cost us almost double the price. So, we had to change. It's not a question of reliability because Cisco is reliable also. It's more a question of something that's not for corporations and more for education in our case.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward. On a scale of 1 to 5, I would rate it a 4.

Deployment took a week. We require less than 5% of our staff for maintenance of this solution to be hassle-free.

We used an integrator for deployment.

I would rate their pricing 3 out of 5.

There is no annual licensing cost.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10. 

It's very good for our needs, but because it's a school, it maybe wouldn't be as good for a corporation or for other users. For our school, it's very reliable. We have peaks, but it's always well-managed. We don't have any problems.