There is ABSOLUTELY [without ONE shadow of doubt] no comparison between Ruckus R510 and AUDIENCE … Ruckus are one of the very few wireless manufactures that know how-to exploit MIMO effectively.
I got an R510, IPQ4019/4029(not sure which) based, got average 500mbps+ and 600mbps max speed of download, coverage is wider than Audience too, makes my Audience looks like an k12 student.
I have an R500 that I bought used and it works really well with the hAP ac2 used as just a router.
On the other hand, I don’t think that a separate router and AP (whether Ruckus or other brand) is really the competition for the Audience. People buying the Audience probably don’t want to mess around with a more complex setup that could include PoE, wired backhaul, multiple vendors and thus multiple management interfaces, etc.
I just wanted to post results when Using an R710 (Again I realize this has a list price of $1,200 US).
root@kvm:~# iperf3 -c 192.168.7.182 -4
Connecting to host 192.168.7.182, port 5201
[ 4] local 192.168.7.3 port 52332 connected to 192.168.7.182 port 5201
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth Retr Cwnd
[ 4] 0.00-1.00 sec 62.5 MBytes 524 Mbits/sec 0 2.03 MBytes
[ 4] 1.00-2.00 sec 84.2 MBytes 706 Mbits/sec 0 2.03 MBytes
[ 4] 2.00-3.00 sec 92.3 MBytes 774 Mbits/sec 0 2.03 MBytes
[ 4] 3.00-4.00 sec 95.8 MBytes 803 Mbits/sec 0 2.03 MBytes
[ 4] 4.00-5.00 sec 98.7 MBytes 828 Mbits/sec 0 2.03 MBytes
[ 4] 5.00-6.00 sec 96.8 MBytes 812 Mbits/sec 0 2.03 MBytes
[ 4] 6.00-7.00 sec 97.3 MBytes 816 Mbits/sec 0 2.03 MBytes
[ 4] 7.00-8.00 sec 98.1 MBytes 823 Mbits/sec 0 2.03 MBytes
[ 4] 8.00-9.00 sec 102 MBytes 858 Mbits/sec 0 2.03 MBytes
[ 4] 9.00-10.00 sec 103 MBytes 864 Mbits/sec 0 2.03 MBytes
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth Retr
[ 4] 0.00-10.00 sec 931 MBytes 781 Mbits/sec 0 sender
[ 4] 0.00-10.00 sec 928 MBytes 779 Mbits/sec receiver
iperf Done.
So I know my MacBook was not the culprit for less than stellar speeds compared
to the Audience.
To try boost your speeds:
- Enable WMM in Wireless settings (CAPSMan turns this on by default)
- Set multicast helper to full.
- Set your rates to the following (for example in CAPSMan):
/caps-man rates add basic=12Mbps name=Rates1 supported=12Mbps,18Mbps,24Mbps,36Mbps,48Mbps,54Mbps
Also try this for even better performance.
/caps-man rates add basic=24Mbps name=Rates1 supported=24Mbps,36Mbps,48Mbps,54Mbps
There is an older discussion I had with someone else about multicast helpers and how they can improve things on a crowded WIfi channel (at the expense of battery life on clients). Rukus and others enable an equivalent helper by default which helps improve throughput on a channel.
Interesting … those broadcasts/multicasts do indeed take a very large part of the air-time if transmitted at 6 Mbps and the unicast is at high speed. (433-866 Mbps)
Some toughts …
- Would 802.11n and ac be using the rates of A/G ? Or would they use the HT and VHT MCSes that are the n and ac modulations for broadcast and multicast? MCS0 single stream is also only 6 Mbps. So one would expect that the MCS0 is replaced with MCS1 as basic rate. Not sure if everyone still can connect. (I have seen tuning were one removes all the slower MCS encodings in the supported rates. Not a good idea to my opinion. You don’t want to be in those rates until it is the only rate that works. So moving up the basic rate OK, Moving up the lower range of supported even higher not convinced that this is OK.)
- I can’t find back if 802.11ac is broadcasting/multicasting at the lowest basic rate (like B/A/G does) , or at the highest basic rate that is lower than all unicast rates. Lower VHT MCSes cannot be disabled in Mikrotik. HT MCSes can be set individually.
- another strong broadcaster is that some devices send many ARP requests. Some threads in the forum mention using “proxy-arp” to avoid these ARP requests in the wireless part. (IF the WLAN is bridged, should the proxy-arp be on the bridge? There the proxy-arp serves another function (“poor man’s routing”).) So I don’t know if it works. The sniffer still sees ARP requests.
- A-MSDU and A-PMDU have an enormous impact on the performance. Some brands have “adaptive frame aggregation”, because A-MSDU performance is sensitive to bit-errors in the transmission. (http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/how-to-get-rid-of-slow-wifi-can-it-be-done/139640/1). Mikrotik only activates A_PMDU for priority “0” by default. Well nobody sets that priority by default (so WMM is clueless), but at least A-PMDU is used, probably static.
Krystian,
the Audience “out-of-the-box” uses the 2x2 11ac as Wifi AP and reserves the 4x4 11ac as “wireless backbone” for connection to
additional audience (or other Wifi device from Mikrotik).
(this is what happened to my Audeince, but Mtik changed the “defaults over time”, but I still think after reset this is what it gives you).
As this device has 2 x 5Ghz Wifi radios, they have to limit the frequency range on each Wifi interface
The 2x2 11ac Wifi interface is 5180-5260 Mhz (non DFS channels in many countries) 18dBm (80Mhz channel)
The 4x4 11ac Wifi interface is 5500 - 5640 Mhz (DFS channels), 23dBm and allows 160Mhz channels
(note these are not your exact values, as I use ETSI/European bands). But US is similar.
using 4x4 makes a lot of sense if you have Macbook (3x3). In addition the output power on the higher 5G Wifi frequency bands
is allowed to be higher than the “low” 5Ghz band (above Power values do show in the “status” page of the Wifi interface)
So what you definetely should do is:
Swap the 2x2 and 4x4 interfaces for AP if you do not use MESH yet. The 4x4 gives further reach, throughput etc…
(you even can use all two interfaces as classic AP as well). All this is just SW/config, the device can handle all combinations.
Again, as others said, you will not get as much Wifi speed as with some other manufacturer units, but you have lot of flexibility and tuning capabilites
for the rest of the system.
PS: Only cave out is that those 4x4 channels are DFS channels: this means if you choose 160Mhz, the initial scan period takes 5-10 minutes before the
device will actually activate the Wifi AP and you will see the SSID.
Yeah, very different setup, I don’t know many people outside of enthusiasts that would even bother with a separate AP and router. I convinced one friend to get a Unifi and he is always stressed about it lol..