Ruckus Wireless WAN Reviews

I use the solution in my company since the product was already in place before I started working in my current organization.

To be honest, all I have done with the tool is to check access points and ensure they are running. The tool is also used to issue guest WiFi passwords.

The license model offered by the product is an area of concern where improvements are required.

To be honest, as far as I am aware, and from my research, the issue is pretty much only with the tool's cost. Some of the configurations in the tool are a bit awkward. With the access points, when I try to apply the configurations now, it doesn't take the firmware.

I have been using Ruckus Wireless WAN for a year and seven months. I use the solution in my company as an end user.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. It takes a minute to find out why it is not responding when going to an access point.

The scalability of Ruckus Wireless WAN benefits your operations since it is pretty good. The issue I have with the tool is associated with the fact that we have a limited number of licenses. In my company, we are considering scaling up a little bit, but the cost of licensing may prohibit it. Also, the controller we have at the moment has reached the end-of-life phase. My company may have to look at changing all the access points and going to a different provider or upgrading the controller, after which it may not be possible to use some of the current access points, and it may cause us to change those for some working-based ones.

Around 50 people use the tool. I really can't say a number with any level of accuracy.

The actual wireless or configurations going into the solution need to be looked upon. Going into the solution to check it is something that is done very frequently.

I tend to use a third-party provider for technical support for the solution. Based on other people's opinions, the technical support is excellent, and I rate it a ten out of ten. I have no personal experience with the tool's support team.

Positive

I have some experience with Cisco, but not as a real user. I switched from Cisco to Ruckus after I switched over to my current organization from another company.

I was not involved in the product's initial setup phase. It was installed prior to my joining.

I have not investigated pricing because it was present in the company when I started. My company is using the rules and plans from the product's document so that we can try to make some decisions and find out some details.

I have not had an opportunity to investigate how Ruckus Wireless WAN can handle network density and high-traffic scenarios.

I have not looked at AI features in Ruckus Wireless WAN.

From my limited experience, I would recommend Ruckus Wireless WAN to others, but I won't be able to say why I would do that.

I rate the tool a seven or eight out of ten.

We use Ruckus Wireless as a wireless solution here and for switching as well. They are also great for outdoor connectivity.

It's great for the hospitality industry. We mainly deployed it here in the hospitality industry as they are very concerned about their customers in hotels. They stay there for leisure, so they don't want any complaints about their WiFi solutions. We mainly deployed them in five-star hotels and in sports facilities. 

We deploy them in our universities where there are a large number of students with multiple devices (laptops, mobile phones, smartwatches). They need a strong, robust solution for WiFi, so we use Ruckus Wireless. 

We rate them very high. We found it a very robust solution.  

I like the smart roaming feature. It is very valuable for us. Nowadays, people use video conferencing on phones and for Zoom meetings, so, while walking on campus or in a hotel, people experience no disconnection while using Ruckus Wireless. It literally helps us give a better experience to the end user.

The initial setup isn't complex. 

It's stable.

The solution can scale. 

The solution offers good security.

The pricing is fair. It's competitive. 

We found the technical support to be helpful.

In my region, I want to increase its distribution channel. We have one sole distributor here in our region. To have multiple distributors here would be very helpful to improve the supply chain. We need better access to stock.

I've been working with the solution for around seven years. 

It is a very stable product. We work on Cisco, Huawei, Aruba, and different wireless solutions, however, as a technical person, I find that Ruckus is one of the most stable products I have experienced.

It has great scalability options. They have controllers that support 3000 APs, so it is more than enough. 

The number of users can easily be ten to 20,000 in a larger-scale network. It is not an issue having a number of users. It is a very scalable solution.

We have used support and find them very helpful. We get service from nine to five, and even after five, if we need assistance, we can get help.

We also work with Cisco, Huawei, Aruba, and different wireless solutions.

We use Cisco here mainly in the market. Cisco was the leading product in switching and wireless before, or rather, Cisco and Aruba. Aruba is HP, and Aruba is a very strong product. However, when we started doing Ruckus, we grew more satisfied selling Ruckus as the more stable product. With a better product, we win the customer's trust and their businesses.

Initially, it's not so complex to implement. For a technical guy, it's normal. It's like every other solution; it's not very complex.

Depending on the setup, for a normal deployment, which would be two to five devices for a smaller-sized office, we can do it in one day.

We have five to ten team members trained on this, and multiple other products (including Sophos, FortiGate, and Cisco) and they can perform deployment and maintenance tasks.

How much staff you need for each deployment depends on the magnitude of the project. Normally, one engineer and one technician are enough for a deployment, which contains WiFi configuration in placement. However, in a case where cabling and infrastructure are needed, we need a different team. It depends on how much cabling is required. Depending on the requirements, we plan the project accordingly.

We can handle the setup in-house. We don't need any consultants to help us.

The licensing has different versions. Licenses are perpetual, you have to only buy one. However, they have support costs that are charged yearly for three years or five years. You have to buy the support for the license.

If you compare it to a similar kind of solution, the pricing is very competitive.

As a service provider, we have deployed many Ruckus solutions here in our country.

We mainly use its newer versions, which are WiFi six supported R550 and R650. These are the fastest-selling products. We normally sell R550 and R650 to our customers.

I'd recommend the solution to others. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We primarily use Ruckus solutions to provide wireless access for our colleagues at branch locations.

We have just moved to their Ruckus Jones platform, which provides a cloud-based management solution. Having all the management tools in a cloud-based solution has been valuable, eliminating the need to deploy and manage an on-premises controller. The AI, which helps diagnose and solve problems, is also beneficial.

There is a need for more flexibility in granular access control. Currently, role-based access is cumbersome and lacks flexibility.

I've been using Ruckus since about two thousand ten.

We had one issue with one venue at one site, but other than that, it has been generally pretty stable.

Scalability seems decent. Adding access points for a site is easy, so scaling is not an issue.

The customer service is generally pretty good, however, there can be delays with open cases, which sometimes take a while to resolve.

Positive

For wireless solutions, I've used Meraki among others.

The initial setup of the Ruckus Jones cloud-based controller and management system was fairly intuitive and straightforward.

I was managing the deployment on my own initially, but I have another team member who assists with network administration. So, it involves one to two people.

The pricing is reasonable for us as partners since we receive discounts. However, I believe for non-partners, it might not be considered cheap, though it isn't the most expensive either.

Good, careful planning is important. It can be helpful to test new firmware on a nonproduction site before rolling it out to other locations. 

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

We use the product to provide WiFi connectivity to hotels and large buildings.

The product’s unleashed feature works as an access point and WiFi controller. We don’t require an extra set of hardware or any licensing with it.

Ruckus Wireless WAN’s most valuable feature is unleashed.

There could be more power supply for the radio features. This particular area of the product needs improvement. They should add a reset factory feature without resetting IP addresses as well.

We have been Ruckus Wireless WAN for at least eight years. At present, we use the latest version.

I rate the product’s stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the product’s scalability a ten out of ten.

I have used HP before. We switched to Ruckus Wireless WAN, especially for its advanced radio features. I have also used less expensive products. We encountered a lot of field failures using them. For our business model, if we have failures in the field, it is a very expensive product.

The initial setup process is very simple.

The product generates a return on investment for us. We have been using it for eight years and it is still working. 

The product has competitive pricing, but always a little low price is better.

We haven’t contacted the technical support team, as we don’t have failures in the field. It is a solid product. I advise others to do a site survey and a well-thought-out design.

I rate Ruckus Wireless WAN a ten out of ten.

I have not found any issues with the solution so far. Whenever I encounter an issue, I chat with support and open a ticket. I have found the communication, hardware, and time to be fine. I have not found any issue in communicating and getting a service. However, the pricing of the solution is very high. I have found Aruba to be cheaper compared to Ruckus. I believe that there should be a reasonable difference in price in the market.

I have not used the location services feature. I don’t know how to monitor it. Cisco has a working Aruba where the latter also has a server. I have not used the monitoring tools either.

I have been using Ruckus Wireless WAN for more than ten years. We are resellers of the solution.

The tool offers stable, reliable, and consistent connectivity over WiFi.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support was helpful. I had sought technical support over one report three to four months back. They were fine. I would rate the technical support between eight to nine.

The initial setup is very easy and you can customize it as per the customer’s LAN and WAN requirements. The installation is different from client to client. It depends on the physical condition to install or finish the project.

I have a couple of people who do the physical deployment while I handle the configuration and server settings.

We do a survey where we ask customers about the kind of WiFi service that they are going to use like voice service, data service, etc. After the survey, we generate a heatmap using my account in the zone planner. I forward the report to the presales team after which they forward the quotation to the customer. If the customer approves the quotation, we go ahead with the installation.

The point where we get stuck is when the customer asks for multiple quotations. When we provide multiple quotations, there is a high chance of customization.

I am not satisfied with the pricing of the solution.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. We are the resellers of the solution and we work with it on an infrastructure level. I have experience in the installation of the solution. I have installed ZoneDirector 1200, SmartZone 100, Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi 6, and a couple of access panels. You can trust and rely on the consistency and reliability of Ruckus Wireless WAN on the WiFi. I had instances where customers had asked me to replace the competitor products with Ruckus.

I have been working with WiFi for more than 17 years. I am not able to convince customers because of the pricing of the solution. Otherwise, we could have sold lots of this tool to the customers. We provide maintenance to our customers. There is also no specific maintenance required for this solution since I have installed a couple of solutions for customers and they are working fine. There is no maintenance required to upgrade until the customer complains that ‘We do not upgrade anything and all the soft software is available on this.'

Ruckus has multiple radios. Therefore, it supports high speed for users and clients. Other vendors have fluctuations in speed. The main thing about Ruckus is that you can trust it and rely on its speed. I am simply satisfied with it.

We use Ruckus Wireless WAN for connectivity.

Ruckus Wireless WAN is an easy-to-use solution.

The solution's AI offering and pricing could be improved.

I have been using Ruckus Wireless WAN for three years.

I rate Ruckus Wireless WAN ten out of ten for stability.

Around 400 users are using the solution in our organization on a daily basis.

I rate Ruckus Wireless WAN ten out of ten for scalability.

The solution's initial setup is easy. I rate Ruckus Wireless WAN ten out of ten for the ease of its initial setup.

We implemented the solution through a third-party integrator. Two people are required to deploy the solution. The solution's deployment took a few hours.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten.

The solution is maintained by one person in our organization.

Overall, I rate Ruckus Wireless WAN ten out of ten.

We install the technology and network for our customers and then we manage the network, like a managed service. Our preferred combination is Ruckus Wireless together with Ruckus Switches. We can combine it with other switches, and we do. It works with Extreme Switches, for example. Still, the preferred combination is Ruckus Switches and Ruckus Access Points because we have one window for support, and we can manage both the switches and the wireless system through the same management system.

With Ruckus we have been able to deploy and manager Wireless installations very efficiently.

The strongest point for Ruckus has always been the radio hardware. They have specific hardware to handle the wireless connections, so on the hardware level, the connectivity works very well. 

Over the years, they have added more and more features to the SmartZone system. At the beginning it was fairly basic, but nowadays we can pretty much do everything that we can do with Extreme or other vendors.

They did improve the reporting feature already, but it's still a separate system. We used to have to install another virtual appliance because we use the on-premise management system with the virtual machine. Now the reporting feature is integrated into the cloud analytics platform, but you still have to buy an extra license for it. It's getting much better, it's pretty good now actually, but it still has to be bought separately. 

If you choose the Cloud Management system instead of the on-prem VM, Analytics are included, but it doesn't have all the features that the virtual machine has. 

Ruckus should also improve its integrated guest management because, right now, the guest portal feature is quite weak.

I have been using this solution for eight years now.

I consider this solution to be stable. The wireless hardware is very, very good. We do have some issues every now and then. Most of the time it needs some fine-tuning, which we have to do with any wireless solution. Sometimes we need tech support and more in-depth tuning, but that's quite rare and happens more in complex scenarios.

The scalability is very good. We can easily add more access points, and if we are hitting the capacity limit of a virtual appliance, we can add another one and operate in a cluster, which can grow quite large.

About two years ago we had a few issues that we had to escalate, but that was more on the switches side. We had some issues with switches and hardware failures, and it took a while to get to the proper support level and get proper answers. In general, however, if we contact support for anything about the wireless solution, we mostly get knowledgeable answers.

I would rate the technical support as a four out of five. It's pretty good, but a little improvement can be done. 

Positive

I wouldn't say that the setup is complex. It might not be as nice optically as the nice GUI that Extreme has, but they did some good improvements with the last update. For example, we can do the provisioning routes through the GUI platform now. 

It's partially because we know what we are doing and we have templates set, but I would say that overall it is pretty easy to set up. I would give the setup process a five out of five.

The solution is very competitively priced. We've always been able to get better pricing for our customers on Ruckus compared to Aerohive from Extreme Networks. We also work with Cisco Meraki, and the pricing is similar, especially the running costs, but the support costs are a bit lower. I think it's interesting that analytics portfolio reporting is included with Extreme, but we have to pay extra for it with Ruckus.

I would say the pricing has always been good, but there is one thing I need to mention. Earlier this year, Ruckus announced that anything that had not been delivered by the middle of May, even if it was ordered last year, would have the prices raised backwards.

We had huge switch deliveries, still outstanding, where Ruckus had told us at the end of last year, "Order now so you can secure the price and we can deliver in six months." They didn't deliver in six months, but they raised the price. That was not very popular. We had to go back to customers and say, "Sorry, this is the situation." We were able to solve it all, but it wasn't very popular. I think it was a major mistake by them because when everyone else was raising prices last year, they didn't, so they gambled on the wrong side and thought they could stand out, but then realized they couldn't.

If we're talking about the pricing itself and not the politics around it, I would rate the price as a four out of five. 

We also offer Extreme to our customers.

There is a feature that Extreme calls a Private Pre-Shared Key, and Ruckus calls it a Dynamic Pre-Shared Key, which is an individual Pre-shared Key for each user. They both have this feature and it had been always a very strong point for Aerohive, now Extreme, but with recent deployments, we've seen that it's now better with Ruckus. If we need to assign different WLANs for each key, it's a nightmare with Extreme, but it's much easier with Ruckus.

We have a big company deployment right now where we have lots of locations and every location connects with the same wireless name, but everyone has their own key and they get their own VLAN network. With Ruckus, we have more flexibility, it's easier to do, and we can use external Pre-Shared Key third-party vendor services, which we can't do with Extreme. With Extreme, the GUI might be a bit nicer, but there's not a big difference anymore. The integrated Guest Management, however, is much better with Extreme. 

I would rate this solution as an eight out of ten. 

I am using it to cover routers in the company.

I have found that WiFi coverage is the most important aspect.

I would like to see the billing system improved by adding a billing system integration.

I have been using Ruckus Wireless WAN for over ten years now.

The stability provided is very nice.

There is no problem with the scalability.

Before moving to Ruckus Wireless WAN we were using Aruba and Cisco.  We switched because of company standards.

The initial setup was straightforward and the process took one week to complete.

I would rate Ruckus Wireless WAN a ten out of ten.