Ruckus Zoneflex R610 Wave 2 Access Point (Smart Wi-Fi 3x3, 802.11ac, BeamFlex, Adaptive Antenna, POE) 901-R610-US00 (Renewed)

Does what it’s supposed to, the way it’s supposed to.

Best wifi ap

No instructions couldn’t get it upAnd running.

I got tired of home solutions crashing and working from home has meant that I require eliable internet. The IOT solutions I have at my home mean I have 50 wireless clients. I had wired what I could but I stream TV and many devices have no wired option.I have google fiber with gigabit speeds. I have successfully validated this wired at 1gig. Wireless I was seeing 400mbps right next to my netgear R7000 but 30mbps across the house. It has worked for a while but recent frequent crashes have left me stranded during calls and my kids schooling.I was trying various units out for performance. I recieved an Aruba IAP-305 unit as a demo that I wired up for comparisons to this which I purchased based on a recommendation. While the two units performed similar when sitting right next to each other averaging 400-500mbps up amd down the Ruckus shines when at a distance performing well over 150mbps when across the house and up stairs through walls and floors. The aruba sitting in the middle of the house barely reaches the end of the house and will only see about 30mbps. Sitting side by side the ruckus is thicker though I dont think this matters much. The 3x3 MIMO makes a good difference in wifi throughput and signaling.For refeence I did need to upgrade this unit to Unleashed firmware as even refurbished it was severly out of date. This is fairly simple but because it was so old it was not button push easy. It required downloading the firmware and using the web interface to side load it on the unit like the old days.Neither of these systems requires a controller to setup but this is still not for the average user. Controllers are availabe for enterprise users but I dont want another box to maintain. Many of the instructions for both the Aruba and the Ruckus were not correct and required some understanding of how to update things over the years to make them work. I ended up connecting to it via a phone and configured via a web browser. I TRIED a PC but had some security issues I got tired of dealing with.The Ruckus provides an unleashed app for Android (not sure about iPhone) that allows very simple wifi configurations. For more in depth you may want to either keep the enterprise firmware or use the web or commandline interface to configure. The app also gives network usage statistics for you APs as well which is handy to have.Multiple interfaces allow you to use this as your router and wifi connection which makes it pretty powerful. If you want to use mesh networking you will have to use the second interface to do this for reasons listed below.The no hassle second unit is really good. If you use this you will have to use the unleashed app if just using power (no network cable) but if you plug in ethernet on the same network one will see the other and mesh requires no work on the second unit. This makes things pretty easy assuming firmware is up to date.One thing that disappointed me was if you want to enable vlan tagging you could not use the mesh setup. Since the AP was using POE and far away I could not use the second interface without running another cable which was not fun to do for me.These units also dont support WiFi6 yet and I am not sure if they are updatable but this does make them pretty stable.The Ruckus had both ceiling tile mounts and screw mounts that can be used. The Aruba can only attach to a false ceiling.My current install includes two of these running unleashed firmware (second one self configured) and a seperate firewall/DHCP server all running off a gigabit POE switch. This covers 3 floors with good speeds and excellent coverage. To be honest 1 is enough to cover everything at 2000sq ft per floor but I have one IOT device just out of range so I added a second AP.In the end I had an enterpise AP that worked but I paid for two more based on the performance of the first one. I will likely update HW as wifi6 stabilizes for enterprise but all my devices have been working flawlessly with this and the setup was pretty straigh forward with the unleashed app.

Easy setup