Gadgetory

when I installed a ruckus r700 wireless access point in my house to replace my premium consumer wireless router my wife's immediate reaction was that she thought I had actually swapped out her phone for one that looked the same but was faster so as much fun as it is for us hardware enthusiasts to blow the rant on a new graphics card a bunch of ram or a fancy case I concluded at that time that we could probably actually get more value for our money by considering Wireless upgrades instead of some of that other stuff it's just too bad that the unit I showed off last time costs $1,000 making it attainable only to folks who are out shopping for water blocks for their Titan X graphics cards but today that changes this is the exclaim x i3 your next wireless access point Kingston's kc3 10 business class SSDs deliver massive capacities firmware based power loss protection and enough performance that were powering our brand-new storage server with them click right here to learn more so when you open the box for an x i3 the first thing you'll see is a gigantic QR code yes this business grade Wireless solution wants you to set it up with a mobile phone what oh and I guess there are also some accessories in there but I you know took me a while to figure that out because my didn't pick my jaw up off the floor so you get a power over ethernet injector a $15.00 value some mounting hardware a little key for removing the unit from the aforementioned mounting hardware and an Ethernet cable and then in most cases I guess probably also the xi3 indoor access point itself let's talk about this sucker for a minute she'll be the hardware actually looks pretty familiar but I guess it's not exactly a top-secret that X clean is a daughter company of ruckus the makers of the super awesome enterprise-grade wireless gear that you're most likely to find at an airport or university versus at the local Starbucks so let's see which one of ruckuses models got cut down a little to make it more price appropriate and user friendly for Wanda of Wanda's diner to deploy in her restaurant Ross Beck's wise the xi3 looks pretty darn similar to the ruckus r500 it's got the same two by two antenna config with the same power output it can handle the same and 300 megabits feeds on 2.4 gigahertz and AC 867 on 5 gigahertz and even the power draw is rated exactly the same I mean sure the 500 client advertised capacity has been toned down to a hundred and along with the other feature trimming very notably the removal of beam flex plus ruckuses proprietary tech for punching through interference and barriers more easily there is no compatibility with ruckuses zone director controllers for local or remote management of scores of access points across a large deployment although apparently a cloud option is coming soon no exclaimed figures any more than 10 APs and you're probably overdoing it and you should to ruckus so back to managing them then how are you supposed to do it right the app it starts with that QR code from before that basically brings up a how-to guide then you install the Harmony Forex clean app password protect the app which by the way touch ID support on iOS it's a very nice touch then you go through a very basic ap setup that pretty much amounts to creating an SSID or a name for your network and a passphrase then you scan for access points on the network and that was the first stumbling block for me and one that I think exclaimed could handle a bit better both of my units upgraded their own firmware once connected to the network with internet access but they didn't reboot on their own and I had to read a little error message in the app to discover that I needed to go manually hard reset the devices to apply the firmware upgrade that should happen on its own with that out of the way though I got the ap configuration page fired up and there's basically nothing in there you can assign one or both of your radios to the SSIDs you create although I would recommend manually breaking out 2.4 and 5 gigahertz if you intend to use this at home so you can manually reserve the faster 5 gigahertz band for devices that matter and leave 2.4 gigahertz to non performance sensitive ones instead of relying on the ApS band steering to decide for you and mock up your game stream performance potentially you can choose a particular channel and channel width for each radio or leave it on auto to let ruckuses channel fly technology hop around according to whichever has the least congestion a feature whose functionality I was surprised to discover when I cracked open my wife's by and saw it flopping around like a Mexican jumping bean in our crowded 2.4 gigahertz environment and one that I'm not 100% sure how I feel about since not being on one 6 or 11 is not really a recommended configuration when you ask most wireless experts there are a few other little things you can tune in there on a per SSID basis you can set bandwidth limits and you can control whether or not clients can see the rest of the wired devices on the network but that's pretty much it I covered the whole thing wireless 4 done which doesn't mean that it sucks it lacks a central controller so with multiple ApS clients are left to decide which one to connect to but the xi3 delivers great wall and floor penetration power even on 5 gigahertz new settings from the app are applied nearly immediately clients connect almost instantly compared to that horrendous lag that's typical of consumer grade gear and range was absolutely freaking awesome I don't really know what to say other than this is really good stuff and you're getting it for less than a third of the price if you're willing to give up some of those ruckus features that if we're being honest with ourselves we'd never be dinking around with in the first place if the bloody Wi-Fi just worked but it's not perfect either I think ruckus is getting pulled in a couple different directions right now they've got a great idea here making deploying a great reliable Wi-Fi solution so easy that any small business or home user can do it but their users you know Wi-Fi tech heads who manage deployments for their customers are inherently hardcore and asking for things that Wanda of Wanda's diner will never understand so ruckus needs to decide once and for all what X claim is personally I'm glad that they caved and added a web-based management tool even if I only poked around in it after I'd set everything up through the app but Wanda actually needs things simplified even further even if that means Oh hiding terms like 20 megahertz or client isolation behind friendly sliders that say I'm in a busy area with lots of other Wi-Fi or I'm in an isolated area and want more performance and it needs like a OneTouch guest network set up for example that does everything for Wanda and while we're at it the navigation of the app does need some polish too like the grayed out actions button in the iOS app that's actually clickable to access some pretty critical settings or the unclear difference between the wireless symbol and the COG from the dashboard which is called statistics instead of I don't know dashboard for some and while we're at it why does the statistics page contain information about how many packets have been sent instead of pretty graphs of use over time or alert heavy user leaching bandwidth off the network or something like that anyone who doesn't care about packets unless they're ketchup but of course I don't think any of this stuff is a deal breaker not even the odd crash of the app because I did have it happen if I did think that I wouldn't have told you this is your next access point now to be clear it's not for everyone for a single or even a couple of wireless clients a similarly priced consumer device will deliver higher speeds but the fastest individual link speed is not the be-all and end-all of Wi-Fi performance especially as you start to load up more clients and I'll take ruckuses ple 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