Ruckus Wireless Reviews

We had to install it to some port areas and in some hospitals. In terms of mobility and reliability, we found these products are very good. Their downtime is really low.

We used to struggle a lot doing the connectivity between the branch offices in port. Ruckus offers the flexibility to pull the connectivity and we can actually manage our workflow and application to this connectivity. It is a wonderful way of doing things fast.

One of the valuable features is the mobility. The transfer of credentials between the wireless APs is absolutely uninterrupted. It is also really reliable in terms of the peer-to-peer connectivity.

From the user point of view, sometimes we face a little bit of a challenge in terms of the channels selection for Ruckus. When we have installed all of the APs outdoors, those channels are actually empty in different numbers, so sometimes we found this challenging for getting paired between these point to point communications. If there is any way we can get some proprietary channels or some IT this interruption will not be there. That would be really fantastic for more reliable connectivity.

It's stable. There were a few incidents which were actually not related to the hardware or power loss.

One of the reasons we actually moved from Juniper to say Ruckus was to avoid a future stoppage. 

We are partners with Fortinet and Juniper so we have gone through their product lines. The reason we chose Ruckus is because from the very beginning we found these companies only worked on wireless.

The initial setup was complex because we were doing it for some restricted areas with some specialized applications. On the other hand, the customer is also quite sensitive in terms of security because that's an essential part. 

We found it a little more expensive than the other competitors on the market. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten because of how stable it is, the easy integration, and their maintenance. It was quite stable and we can easily scale up our installation. The integration is quite easy for now, and we already have implemented all the challenging applications and challenging environments.

Stability is something that's very important, then mobility you have to check, nowadays  Ruckus is mostly used for the enterprise-class, it's not a retail product. The climate is very important for wireless where you have quite a number of APs. If you don't have good mobility, you might not be able to enjoy the usefulness of this wireless technology. 

• Wireless platform for user and medical production devices throughout the enterprise
• Also serves guests wirelessly.

Better AP capabilities in tough RF environment. We upgraded from a Cisco wireless network and saw a marked improvement. Near flawless VoWiFi using Spectralink phones.

Adaptive antenna arrays (and corresponding algorithms) allow for excellent performance in challenging environments.

It's always good to have more analytics and reporting right on the controller when possible. However, Ruckus already has pretty good capabilities in that area as well as an excellent big data analytics engine with SmartCell Insight.

It is helpful with our performance and keeping the client connected with the axis point. The connectivity of the product is amazing. 

The connectivity is the most valuable feature.

I suggest more controlling features on the controller. The menu of the performance must be improved, as well.

There are no issues with stability of the product.

I have not used technical support.

We have prior experience with Aruba Wireless.

We use and deploy it to provide internet access to our corporate users, walk-in guests, and sites users.

The solution is extremely useful, but too costly. Most customers revoke the idea of deploying it when they observe the cost per AP license.

• The product is very reliable. 
• It has a great response.
• It has one of the smoothest operations. 

It is too costly.

The cost per AP license should be worked on.

We have Ruckus ZoneDirectors and WAPs in all of our facilities. We have one ZoneDirector 1200 and three ZoneDirector 3000s spread across our facilities geographically, all running the latest firmware (10.1.1.0 Build 26). The ZoneDirectors are controlling a total of 48 WAPs.

Dead zones were immediately eliminated when we deployed these WAPs in all of our locations, plus Ruckus’ analytics on the ZoneDirectors allow us to quickly identify clients that are taking too much bandwidth.

We are able to quickly identify Rogue WAPs in our network and move to disconnect them immediately when Ruckus alerts us.

We also had a plant where the fiber link between switches broke without warning a few months ago. The Ruckus WAPs immediately recognized the network outage and put themselves into bridge mode to bring the network back up over the WiFi link. It was so seamless we didn’t catch the fiber outage for almost 24 hours. 

It also enabled us to quickly roll out RADIUS authentication for our internal company network and eliminate shared WPA keys which all of our plants were using previously.

Ruckus WAPs have excellent coverage and their beamforming means that we can cover more area with fewer WAPs. 

At times of heavy network congestion, we can restrict the bandwidth available to clients either by SSID or at the client level, which helps cut down on our bandwidth costs.

Ruckus makes securing your wireless network as easy as a few clicks. For a basic installation, even someone without advanced IT skills could set up this system without assistance.

The only complaint I have about Ruckus is the price, but considering other enterprise WiFi products are similarly priced, I feel Ruckus is a superior product I don’t have much to complain about. The latest ZoneDirector firmware addressed all of the tiny issues I hated in older releases.

We have never had a WAP fail in the four years we’ve been using Ruckus in the enterprise; the reliability is top-notch.

We are a church with an average weekend attendance of 3000. We use our Ruckus Wireless for our people to access the bible during services, as well as provide online access, etc. We use it daily for our staff of more than 50 users, as well as our Rock RMS Church Management System check-in (which we use iPads and some PCs for - most are WiFi).

There is better security on our internal SSID/VLAN due to the use of Zero-IT.

Zero-IT: It is easier to get people connected to the correct SSID without providing a passphrase.

The interface should be mobile friendly.

We have replaced some EOL access points this past year with newer AC capable devices.

Mainly for large, residential home automation systems. 

It allows us to deploy systems and not deal as much with support, because it just works.

• It's reliable.
• The company is amazing - the support and service are amazing.
• It outperforms anything else on the market.
• It's easy to use.

Mounting options for outdoor access points, I think they could easily improve on that. 

I think that Web management, global management, could be improved. Unfortunately, there's not one solution that does everything. There are something like six different solutions, and each of them do something better than the others.

Very stable.

Not at all. Scalability is one of the things that they excel at, beyond everybody else.

It depends. It's hard for us to say because we have a very close relationship with them, so we have back-channel access to their top people. In fact, we're the first ever gold service partner, so we basically are the support now. For any systems that we sell, we're the direct support for that product. 

I think if you're a new person starting out, you can get close relationships with the local sales engineers, which is great. When I first started, the first time I even looked at the product, a sales engineer met me out in the field, took some demo gear, put it up, showed me everything. Even within that first year, I had an engineer walk three high-rise courthouses for Miami Dade County; walked every single floor with me. I was a new partner and they did that for me, which is amazing.

I think the phone support is okay, if you're just a regular partner. And it works. I would say if somebody got to know their local rep, that would be the best way to get help if you really need it in a bind.

We used to use Cisco's enterprise wireless, but I kept hearing about Ruckus and I just couldn't believe that some upstart company was better than Cisco. Once we started using it, we saw that it outperformed Cisco and, on top of that, the difference in configuration between Cisco and Ruckus is night and day. Cisco is a pain to configure, where Ruckus is pretty much already set up out of the box. There are a few tweaks here or there, but the configuration time is 10 times faster with Ruckus versus Cisco.

An engineer met me out in the field, put some gear up, and it just blew the Cisco away. And it was just so much easier to configure, that it was a no-brainer. It was cheaper. We had better coverage, it was more reliable, it was faster, and it was easier to configure. It's one of the best companies I've ever dealt with in my life. I have nothing but good things to say about them, which is the only reason I'm doing this review, because I think they deserve it.

It's very straightforward.

It's definitely a good value. It's more expensive than some of the other offerings out there, but when you compare it to other enterprise-class gear, it's very well priced. And the beauty of it is, because it has better range because of their patented BeamFlex - which is the way they can send and receive and listen to signals - you can actually use fewer access points. That means that it's a cheaper overall project.

Aruba, Meraki - and this was Meraki before Cisco, at the time. But since then we always look to see what else is out there, see if something's better, and so far we haven't found anything. Once something better comes along, we'll use it because we only want to use the best for our clients.

Don't wait, do it now.

SMB is what we have been using Ruckus for. We have a few clients with multiple buildings and/or larger campuses that this works great with. We have deployed the outdoor APs as well and they are solid devices, especially in our hot summers in Texas.

It really is almost a set-it-and-forget-it solution. Our helpdesk guys can easily administrate it if needed, and troubleshoot with minimal training. Along with our documenting and naming schemes for APs and locations of devices, finding and correcting issues is easy, but rare.

The list of options you have is great:

• throttling guest networks
• the controller dashboards for administration
• on-the-fly configuring, settings, hours of use, etc.

The most valuable is the central administration. Provides quick views of activity, from the number of clients online to signal and noise readings.

The cloud controller needs work. My big issue is that all APs can't set static IPs. Also, adding customers to your dashboard is not that easy at all. I wish I could pop out some reporting from the dashboards as well.

The Unleashed is a 10 out of 10. It's a great price point to push with our smaller clients and still provides top-notch coverage and features. I am not a big fan of the hosted cloud controller, 5 for that.