Anyone have some good recommendations for a Wall Jack AP solution? I see a lot of devices out there, but don’t get many recommendations on personal experience.
bueller?
We use the Ruckus faceplate AP’s. Brilliant bits of kit.
Surely Mikrotik can make a product like this based on the 751/951 platform. It just needs an internal ether1/PoE jack, or some other way to route a cable around to the front of the board, and a backing plate that fastens to a standard wall plate bracket. Surely it can be done for much less than the $200+ that some manufacturers charge for such a product.
If Mikrotik launched such a product, we’d still use the Ruckus. Theres no comparison - when Mikrotik finally get round to fixing the ongoing wireless and bridge/wds issues then that may change, but as it is, Mikrotik just doesnt cut it anymore on the AP front. Even the controllers are now sadly missing features found in the Nomadix gateways, meaning its hard to find a fit for them in many Hotels ;-(
At 1/5 the unit cost, you don’t think Mikrotik would have a market in offices and hotels for a 951 in a wall-plate-mount case?
Agreed! And what wireless issues have you been having with Mikrotik? If you know how to configure them properly, they are some of the most reliable access points you can buy.
For a wall jack access point, I would highly recommend the Jack Pack from Panoptic: http://www.panoptictechnology.com/smart-room-network-jacks/
They’re fairly cheap, POE powered, and have fairly powerful radios. They can do multiple SSIDs, VLANs, and can do gigabit ethernet. They’re super easy to install and they look nice and don’t protrude from the wall.
Thanks all for the help. Nice to hear some personal experience with these devices.
Of course! I must of assumed the 2,000+ Mikrotik radio’s we’ve installed, combined with our complete lack of knowledge of Mikrotiks (clearly the MTCNA and MTCWE exams are a waste of time!) counted for nothing.
Theres is NO comparison between a Mikrotik AP and and Ruckus AP. As a Ruckus BIG DOG we get the kit for much cheaper than 5xthe cost of the RB751 (nearer 2x). We cover in excess of 400,000 hotel rooms with WiFi, plus some 80,000 external pitches/moorings.
Out of interest, how much comparisons have you carried out between the Ruckus and MIkrotik units in the field?
We love Mikrotik. NO questions, but Mikrotik APS are not as good as Ruckus, and they never will be. Different Markets.
each have they advantage and disadvantage…
to make you life easy then should go for ruckus and it’s friendly to the entry level technician but it do have a lot of limitation.
turn to mikrotik, it’s not user friendly for the newbie but if you can make you configuration on the script based, like us, then just copy and paste, <3 seconds, done.
with mikrotik, a lot of thing you can play around and you can make it smart intelligent but you need to have high level of the skill, scripting.
turn to company point of view, it based on many consideration, no right or wrong. just the matter how and what you plan.
honestly, i love, mean more than like, i love mikrotik support especially uldis, janis, normunds, and few more, they are very helpful and prompt respond, compare to ubnt, aih~ ubnt is suck~!
In your price comparison I’m pretty sure you’re forgetting cost of the ZoneDirector, per unit licencing fees and mandatory annual support fees.
I vote for Ruckus units. Mikrotik’s lack of antenna diversity, auto channel coordination and auto tx power adjustments, combined with a lack of centralised control (dude is a monitor, and full of bugs), make MT a very bad choice when you need to manage hundreds of APs.
Stick them in a wall plate and all sorts of issues come up:
-no 802.3af
-LEDs which can’t be turned off
-many DOA or hardware which is easily broken.
Ruckus is robust, easy to manage, and has excellent support.
Tell that to people who purchased ZoneDirector1000 only to learn that it was being no longer supported (because Ruckus messed up and equipped it with so little memory their developers just gave up). ZoneDirectors are not cheap, about $11000 retail (pair), probably 6k with a discount.
you don’t need a ZD for basic functionality with the wall plates. A ZD only makes your life easier, but that’s OT in this post.
If you don’t use ZD than you loose your claim for Ruckus to be “easy to manage” and “robust”. Frankly I don’t know of anyone who is using Ruckus w/o ZD for installs with many APs.
I suppose one could save a lot of money using no ZD but last time I looked CLI management was deemed “experimental”. I’m curious now, what software do you use to manage the standalone Ruckus APs (VLANs, queues, bandwidth management, firewall etc)?
We’re going way off-topic now, and this is a MikroTik forum - I’ll hit you offlist.
Edit: Just found out I can’t - feel free to get in touch, search for my company (below) and head to About Us.
I agree with TheWiFiGuy - I have over 2000 MikroTik access points in the field also I have MTCNA, MTCWE, MTCRE certifications. Mikrotik has lost its way in the access point front, I also have the same bridging/WDS issues, which has put me off MikroTik AP’s I have waited too long for fixes and it doesn’t seem to be coming so I’m currently looking at other manufacturers.
MikroTik are great for gateways/routers and maybe point to point links, but WDS systems since 4.17 it just doesn’t work. I have tried every version 5 going and setting under the sun but it always ends up the same. It seems like they have dropped everything to work on v6 and the cloudcore, when there as still so many problems with 5.
I also agree with andreacoppini
If MikroTik want to be a big player in the AP market they need to add features like Ruckus “BeamFlex”, 802.3af and have some kind of controller (not the dude). But most important they be more robust on the wireless front, I’m fed up now of looking at problems with MikroTik APs thinking “strange its been working for days and whys it stopped working now”. Where with ruckus I can install and forget about them…
just off topic, what AP are you having success with now then if you have moved away from MT Access points?
thanks
FWIW, most of the WDS issues I have encountered were finally fixed as of 5.18. (better late than never)