Cisco, Ruckus Deliver Painless Bulletproof Wi-Fi Ideal For SMBs My Experiences

It has long been clear that the days of wired Ethernet networks were numbered as an endpoint connection and while most homes long ago ditched switches and CAT5 cables for an all-in-one Wi-Fi router, many businesses were loath to give up the security, performance and reliability of an office Ethernet for wireless LANs. Building business-class WLANs still takes planning and skill (see this post and the accompanying report for details), however the combination of better, more mature wireless standards and equipment have made it much easier. Easier, but not foolproof.

WLAN configuration and management is still something of a black art that often leaves the IT generalists that generally operate SMB infrastructure overwhelmed. That’s beginning to change, as I first detailed in this column, now that products combining consumer convenience with enterprise features and resilience are increasingly common. I called it the democratization of IT and nowhere has the convergence of power and convenience been more apparent and useful than in WLAN equipment.

I’ve been testing a couple stellar examples of enterprise wireless systems designed for SMBs over the past couple months. The first, mentioned in my earlier column, is the Ruckus Wireless Unleashed: a product I described as “combining the simplicity of stand-alone APs with the enterprise features and central manageability of a Wi-Fi controller.” More recently, I’ve been putting a Cisco Aironet 1830 to the test and found it equally trivial to configure. The AP is equipped with Mobility Express, Cisco’s embedded, controllerless software designed for non-specialists in SMBs, education, retail and hospitality that delivers on its promise of 10-minute provisioning and features a beautifully designed Web management interface exposing a plethora of network data and configuration settings. Like Ruckus Unleashed, what sets Mobility Express EXPR +2.38% apart is the fact that most of the configuration details are automatically setup using best practices that will be fine in the vast majority of SMB situations.

Introduced last fall, Mobility Express, which runs on Aironet 1830 and companion 1850 APs, is designed to hide complexity and like Ruckus Unleashed can support networks of up to 25 APs without a central controller. The first AP in a Mobility Express network acts as a management hub pushing configuration settings to the others, which can include older Aironet 1700, 2700 and 3700-series APs. The new APs differ only in RF capacity: the smaller 1830 has two radios supporting up to 80 MHz channels (on the 5 GHz a-band) and 3×3 MIMO, while the 1850 supports 4×4 MIMO streams.

Unlike the Ruckus product, both Aironet models 802.11ac Wave 2 devices meaning they support multi-user MIMO with two and three spatial streams respectively. Although Ruckus does offer a Wave 2 product, the R710, it doesn’t work with the simplified, controllerless Unleashed software. Instead, Unleashed uses Ruckus’ Wave 1 products, the 3×3 R600 or 2×2 R500 that I have. (For those unfamiliar with the terminology, NxM MIMO refers to the number of transmit and receive antennas in an AP. Thus, a 2×2 product has two pairs of antennae capable of handling two spatial wireless streams simultaneously, while a 3×3 AP adds a third antenna pair and supports three streams).

The 802.11ac Wave 2 specification increases the maximum theoretical bandwidth through each AP using several techniques and adds standard support for beam forming, a technique that increases radio sensitivity for by dynamically focusing directional antennae on individual devices as they move. However since none of the current APs approach Wave 1’s theoretical bandwidth limits and Ruckus already uses a proprietary beam forming technology, there’s currently little practical difference between the two in most situations.

The products have a similarly simple setup process requiring just a few steps:

1. Power up the AP (using power over Ethernet for a single cable to a switch is preferred)
2. Connect to a default and conspicuously-named SSID (“CiscoAirProvision” for the Aironet and “ConfigureMe-xxxxx” for the Ruckus)
3. Connect to the management portal on a default IP address (typically the gateway address on the temporary wireless network you’ve just connected to)
4. Run a setup wizard (which will require few if any changes, other than names and addresses, from the default configuration)
5. Save the configuration and reboot the AP

The real magic of both systems comes when expanding the network by adding APs since these are automatically discovered by the master and seeded with its configuration. APs aggregate usage stats back to the master which populates consolidated reports on a management dashboard and automatically syncs configuration changes. Should the master ever drop offline, another AP assumes the role. Having only one AP, I couldn’t test this with Mobility Express, however Ruckus Unleashed works flawlessly. Unplugging the master caused my second unit to assume the role (this is visible by an indicator LED) and uninterrupted use of the management console. Connected clients never knew the difference since the APs shared a common SSID. I suspect streaming applications might glitch if the AP they’re associated with drops offline, however they would quickly reassociate to another one.

I don’t have the equipment to do meaningful wireless performance testing under realistic conditions (lots of clients), however informal tests showed the expected behavior: dual-band 11n and 11ac clients correctly bonded to the 5 GHz channel, channel numbers were correctly assigned to avoid the 4 or 5 other APs in my environment, clients on the Ruckus network transparently associated with the best AP and I never dropped a connection.
Other both products do an admirable job of hiding complex network details from those that just want to get something running, Cisco’s Mobility Express includes a much richer set of options and auto-configured best practices (over 20) including an easy way to set QoS levels, from “Platinum” for VoIP to “Bronze” for background traffic, for different WLANs.

Cisco and Ruckus aren’t the only vendors seizing the opportunity to make enterprise WLAN setup and administration easier. Aruba (now part of HP) has a line of Instant APs and Aerohive has its controllerless, Cooperative Control design (although Aerohive uses a cloud service, not a local master AP, for system management). In sum, SMBs or organizations with remote locations lacking IT personnel have plenty of great choices for building a bulletproof WLAN without the setup pain and management frustration typical of traditional enterprise network gear.