In this third part of the Premium Home WiFi 6 setup comparison series, I will be comparing the ease of use amongst Aruba Instant, Ruckus Unleashed and Ubiqui ti UniFi WiFi systems.
Setup
For each of the systems, the latest version of OS/firmware at the time of this writing are used. Each systems were configured with multiple access points setup with at least 3 or more APs.
| HPE Aruba Instant | Ruckus Unleashed | Ubiquiti UniFi | |
|---|---|---|---|
| OS/Firmware Version | 8.11.2.1 | 200.14 | 8.0.24 |
Introduction
As a home user, the simplicity in WiFi system is very important. For me, the ideal WiFi system is setup once and forget. If you only need a single access point with basic functionality, each system allows an option to set them up as a standalone mode. This is simple for any of the three but it lacks features such as group configuration of APs and radio resource management. Today, I will be focusing on the cluster mode of operation setup in each system where multiple-APs can be configured as a group.
In this category of comparison, I will be looking at followings:
Initial Setup
Unlike typical consumer graded mesh network system’s plug and play offering, each of the three systems requires a little more time commitment from users for the initial setup.
The common general flow for initial setup is
- Configure controller unit
- Create first SSID
- Add (more) access point(s)
Creating the first SSID on each system is simple, step by step for all three. Once the controller is up and running, adding more APs in any of these system is essentially plug and play. So the extra effort in each system comes from the controller unit setup.
Let’s take a closer look.
Aruba Instant
In Aruba Instant, the first AP on the network becomes a virtual controller while it is still serving normal access point function. Subsequently, added APs will copy the virtual controller setting. So if the original AP goes down for any reason, any of the other APs can takeover the controller role.
While both Aruba instant and Ruckus unleashed support different mode of operation on a given hardware, Aruba instant allows conversion between non-Instant and Instant modes through the simple admin menu selection. This means even if you got an AP running in non-Instant mode, you can easily convert it to Instant mode through browser admin GUI as long as the AP has proper version of firmware installed. This is different on Ruckus Unleashed, and I will be explaining this later.
Account Registration
The hardest part of Aruba Instant setup is actually not even part of Aruba configuration. It is actually creating a free account on their official website.
Although this isn’t required for functional Aruba Instant AP, if you need to download particular version of firmware, this may be something you need to do to obtain the copy of the firmware.
As the first time Aruba user, I even had difficulty finding the proper official site to register. But the real challenge was they don’t take public domain email like gmail. Some suggested to use work email. But one of the step during the registration was linking to existing domain group based on email domain.
In my case, my work already had account with HPE Aruba, but I did not want to link my account to the work because this is purely for my personal use. Fortunately, I have private domain email account. So I was able to create an account. Even though it did not cost me anything, this was most tedious online account registration I have ever experienced.
Ruckus Unleashed
Ruckus Unleashed controller runs on the AP similar to Aruba instant. If you have Ruckus Unleashed firmware pre-installed on your AP, the initial setup of Ruckus is extremely easy. After the initial powering, it takes several minutes for the system to initialize.
When the master AP is ready, its browser based admin page immediately takes us to setup. This is the cleanest first page setup I have ever seen. It has minimum required amount of information for new WiFi system.
On this single page, the first SSID name, Unleashed admin account name and their respective password will be only required four fields. I wish this becomes a standard practice for every new WiFi system setup.
Firmware Flash
The potential extra step of Ruckus Unleashed is firmware flash. Unlike Aruba Instant, Ruckus will require full firmware flashing for switching between different mode of operation. If you purchased Ruckus AP with model number starting 901, they do not come with Unleashed firmware. So the first step is to flash the unleashed firmware. In order to download new firmware, we have to first register on Ruckus support website. The registration and actual download of firmware is free.
Unlike Aruba, registering on Ruckus Support site was as easy as registering for any other website, and you can use public domain email address. So this wasn’t hard by any means, but Ruckus could have certainly made this simpler by having a first setup page to let user choose Unleashed vs. other mode, and download firmware from online automatically.
UniFi
Unlike the other two systems, UniFi requires controller running on separate unit outside of access point. The option here involves either significant amount of time or extra money. The first option is free, which is to setup self hosted UniFi’s controller server on own device. However, this option involves quite a bit tweaking and running a risk of unexpected issue. I have not tried this option myself, but I’ve read some facing technical difficulties that sounds like attributable to taking this route.
Officially recommended option is to purchase dedicated controller unit like UniFi Dream Machine series, Cloud Key, or recently released UniFi Express. The practical price range of these units for home use purpose range from $149 to $999. If you view these units as sole controller for UniFi’s cluster AP operation, this becomes added cost to these APs. However, in most case, we purchase these devices for additional features.
In my case, I have had UniFi Dream Machine Pro almost from the day 1 of my UniFi experience. This is also router/gateway unit and runs video surveillance system. So I am certainly getting more value than just as AP controller.
As the third option, there is also monthly subscription based cloud controller offering, but I’m not interested in this option at the moment as it feels analogous to paying license to use own network gears. Regardless of whichever controller option you end up choosing, the very first step for UniFi’s cluster AP setup is to configure the controller.
Since UDM Pro is a router/gateway unit, there were moments I had lost internet access at home while setting this up. I had ended up trying the initial setup at least three times before I got it to work. At one point, I had even worried that I might have bricked the unit. My personal experience goes back to almost 4 years ago, so I thought this was no longer relevant, but recently I’ve read a reddit post mentioning identical to what I have experienced.
Navigation/UI
As a home user, the ease of use correlates with user interface.
UniFi
When it comes to graphical user interface, Ubiquiti’s prosumer graded design shines here. Most users who are looking into option like UniFi are tech savvy, and enthusiast, but most of us are not at the level of network or WiFi engineers. So many of us prefer graphical user interface over the command line interface. We are also used to seeing visually refined apps.
While all three systems offer the similar types of data through admin page, UniFi put extra effort with many nice graphical representation of those data. Although some of these graphs may not necessary add any system performance benefit, they are visually more appealing and give me more excitement while navigating UniFi UI.
Ruckus Unleashed
In contrast, Ruckus Unleashed GUI looks as if it was developed two decades ago. If I had not known the reputation of Ruckus access point performance, I would have actually worried if this is really built by high quality vendor. Yet, this turned out to be the most intuitive of all three. Even for my first use, I knew immediately where the data or configuration that I want to change be located in Ruckus Unleashed admin menu.
Aruba Instant
On my initial use, Aruba Instant felt the least intuitive of three system, and it has the steepest learning curve. One of the main reason is related to the fact some of the Aruba Instant feature requires subscription/license. Yet such requirement is not obvious.
I ended up spending a few hours here and there only to find out that I actually do not have proper subscription/license to enable certain functionality. I had wished they made it clear by disabling those features or flags user immediately when proper subscription or license is not available on the system.
Aruba Instant’s navigation is not as intuitive as Ruckus Unleashed. There are so many options, and some felt to be hidden under unexpected section for the first time user. Its graphical representation is not as pretty as the UniFi even though they do offer some graphical data.
Once I got hang of it, it’s grown on me. For example, I like the right upper corner search box, where I can search for client device name, network name and jump to the detail from anywhere.
Custom Configuration
With any of these three systems, majority of home user will need to do some custom configuration beyond the basic SSID creation. However, the relative effort required amongst each will differ. Since each home use case is different, I can only compare the system based on my personal use.
For our home, we have a little over 40+ WiFi devices. These devices consist a dozen Apple products and various brands IoTs.
Amongst these devices, our specific needs are followings:
- Airplay/AirPrint support
- Sonos compatibility
- B&W Wireless speaker compatibility
- Guest Network creation
- IoT Network creation
Let’s take a closer look at how easy or difficult each system were to configure them.
Zero configuration Network Setup
In order to use features like AirPrint, Airplay or Google Chromecast, the network needs to support broadcast/multicast. In an enterprise setting, these traffics can be a massive source of network congestion. By default they are blocked or restricted, so we need to enable this in each system.
In Aruba Instant, this requires disabling default broadcast filtering setting on a specific SSID. Aruba goes in detail including explanation of why we need to do this on their user manual. In fact, this is how I learned the detail about why broadcast/multicast needed for features like AirPrint. Yet, this was far from being obvious for casual user like myself. I only learned this after referencing to the 500+ page official user manual.
For UniFi, this is configured at the level of LAN or VLAN. This is by enabling the Multicast DNS option. UniFi has a hover-over text specifically addressing this is recommended feature for Airplay within their admin menu. So despite not understanding the technical detail, I was able to get my AirPrint going with UniFi system.
On Ruckus Unleashed, some suggests we need to set Directed MC/BC Threshold down to 0, for me the default value of 1 worked fine. In another word, I did not have to do anything with Ruckus Unleashed to get AirPrint to function.
Sonos Compatibility
Sonos can be one of a major source of connectivity incompatibility in WiFi networks due to their system design. In short, Sonos setup can be either wired or wireless. The wired setup needs at least and usually exactly one Sonos speaker wired and rest are wireless. In this setup, Sonos creates own 2.4 GHz WiFi mesh network, called SonosNet. The wired speaker will act as a hub in this setup. In wireless setup, all speakers will be wireless and they will be connected to your own WiFI network just like any other WiFi client device in your home.
Aruba Instant
For Aruba, all I had to do was the same as Airplay. Just disable broadcast filter. With that, SonosNet and Wireless setup work without any issue in Aruba Instant.
UniFi
UniFi has an official article about Sonos on UniFi Network. Their recommendation is either wire all speakers or do not wire any. The former sounds like a not good use of Sonos speakers for most users. On the other hand, I personally like the latter setup and that’s how I had been using Sonos speakers with UniFi for years.
The key configuration here was just to turn on mDNS, similar to Aruba Instant. I cannot recall testing SonosNet setup with UniFi myself, but it sounds like not recommended by Ubiquiti.
Ruckus Unleashed
Ruckus Unleashed addresses about Sonos compatibility challenge on their own official article. Their recommendation is to use SonosNet. This worked well for me. However, for the wireless setup, I had to do a bit of online research and personal testing. Eventually, what I found out is while it can be done, this needs to access command line interface and essentially turn off QoS. This was the most complicated configuration change I had to do amongst 3 system for Sonos. I’m also a bit worried that turning off QoS all together as that can potentially affect other part of network performance.
If you are interested how to use Sonos on Ruckus Unleashed network, I’ve written a specific article about it so you can check it out here.
Bowers and Wilkins Speakers
These are basically like Sonos speakers, but all are meant for Wireless. None of the three system had immediate issue connecting these including 2.1 stereo pair setup. However, UniFi setup had strange, unpredictable intermittent disconnect of B&W speakers when not used for a while. Sometimes I had to just reboot the speaker, but the other times, I had to reset them to get 2.1 paring. This has not happened on Aruba Instant or Ruckus Unleashed so far.
IoT WiFi
Usually, we want to isolate IoT devices into their own WiFi network. One main reason is they tend to be slow and usually do not require high priority. So making 2.4 GHz only radio is a good idea. So here, the very basic setup requirement is creating a single radio SSID. All 3 system supports this.
All 3 hides this under Advanced Options setting. The same can of course be done to create 5 GHz radio only network.
Guest WiFi
Guest WiFi is also common amongst home users. The key setting usually here is “isolation”. We want to isolate client device talking to each other within the WLAN, and also we want to ensure the client device do not have any access to underlying home network devices.
All three supports Guest WiFi network creation with step by step configuration menu. They all even supports cafe or airport like hotspot option with customizable log in page if you want to go that direction. In the end, all three can achieve the same core task of Guest WiFi. However, here Aruba Instant was the hardest to setup.
Unlike the other two Aruba Instant default SSID setup is to allow all connections. So we need to manually add set of access control rules to block all connections. This has to be in the exact order, and also explicitly allow dhcp and dns for proper function.
In contrast, Ruckus Unleashed automatically adds equivalent access control rule settings when Guest WiFi type is selected. I am not sure why Aruba Instant did not do the same since they also offer “Guest” as type of SSID.
Optimization
WiFi performance is influenced by interference. Proper channel parameter setting and cell size adjustment are paramount for reducing WiFi interference. In home setup, WiFi environment may change dynamically due to neighbor’s WiFi, so channel parameter setting may need adjustment if we want to maintain high system performance.
In multi-AP system, suboptimal selection of these parameters can result in creation of the worst interference source and degrade WiFi performance significantly. As a result we may see reduction in throughput, lose seamless roaming, and even frequent device disconnect.
Hence, availability of automatic radio resource management can be a major “simplicity” factor for some. If a system offers full radio resource management (RRM), optimal performance can be maintained without any manual labor and time devotion from user. On the other hand, if the system lacking any automatic RRM, we might have to spend hours to configure the optimal performance at beginning, and may even need to readjust whenever WiFi environment changes.
Aruba Instant
For my 3 AP-535 setting, Aruba Instant’s RRM settles to 3 non-overlap 2.4 GHz channel. For 5 GHz at 80 MHz channel width, it settles to 1 overlap channel pair with one of the AP reducing its transmission power by 2 dBm. These parameter choice make a perfect logical sense in reducing co-channel interference while providing the best coverage. The end result provides maximum throughput next to each AP without sticky client issue even if I had Aruba Instant’s client match turned off. So the chosen parameters are indeed appropriate. I have not seen any reason to manually optimize Aruba Instant.
Ruckus Unleashed
Ruckus Unleashed also has built in automatic radio resource management including patented technology like ChannelFly, which uses actual channel capacity rather than interference measurement for dynamic adjustment of channel.
Note: In general, Ruckus does NOT recommend enabling this feature as it can lead to non-optimal AP power levels. With BeamFlex access points, Ruckus’ general guidelines are to run access points at full power to maximize the throughput and SINR levels, thus maximizing data rates and performance
RUCKUS Unleashed 200.13 User Guide Self Healing
Although Ruckus Unleashed supports automatic transmission power adjustment, this is turned off by default and not recommended by Ruckus. Instead Ruckus recommends to keep AP’s transmission power max and let their adaptive antenna technology, BeamFlex+ to reduce co-channel interference.
From what I have seen, this seems to be indeed the case with Ruckus RRM. Unlike Aruba Instant RRM, despite positioning Ruckus APs on the same location as Aruba, Ruckus often chose and kept overlapping channels including 2.4 GHz rather than picking 3 non-overlapping channels for each of the three APs.
Although I cannot say how well BeamFlex+ work for avoiding co-channel interference, I have been experiencing an issue with smooth roaming and sticky client with Ruckus Unleashed setup, especially when I add more APs with higher ranged coverage i.e. 2 R550 + 1 R750 in comparison to 1 R350 + 1 R750.
I have no doubt this can be fixed with proper selection of variable parameters. However, this involves essentially full manual tweaking,
I’ve tried turning on automatic AP power adjustment, which did not help and actually just kept max power all 3 APs. I’ve also tried adjusting BSS Minimum. This was still a hit and miss for my setup, and did not eliminate sticky client. I’ve also tried command line interface tool, “smart roam“.
This sounds like indeed the specific configuration parameter for sticky client elimination. However, this is actually a value based configuration where we are manually choosing threshold RSSI value to force disassociate client. Official recommendation is start small and gradually increase by trial and error. I personally believe BSS minimum adjustment is always a bit risky parameter to play with since each client have different response.
So overall, with Ruckus Unleashed setup, I have to spend hours during initial setup to get optimal performance as its RRM does not work well for roaming. However, once the proper cell size is configured, I believe Ruckus Unleashed RRM should be able to maintain the performance in handsfree.
UniFi
From the practical stand point, UniFi lacks any usable radio resource management. So here we need to rely on manual optimization for the initial setup, and maintenance whenever WiFi enviroment changes.
The amount of time these optimization require depends widely based on one’s home setup and WiFi environment. In my very limited personal experience, this feels exponential to the number of APs we have. This is because the more AP we have the more risk we get for creating WiFi interference from our own APs. Therefore, the importance of optimizing each parameters becomes more important.
So if you have only APs and live in fairly stable WiFI environment where neighbor’s WiFi signal don’t change much, this may be a fairly simple task.
On the contrary, if you have multiple APs, and neighbor changing their channel constantly, you will need to spend at least couple hours during initial setup, then readjust channel whenever you start noticing performance degradation afterwards.
Summary
My personal take home points for this section of comparison are:
- UniFi has the best first impression due to its excellent GUI.
- Aruba Instant has the steepest learning curve.
- Aruba Instant offers the best hands free optimization experience
- Ruckus Unleashed RRM do not work well for roaming/sticky client issue
- Ruckus Unleashed with Sonos wireless setup requires command line interface configuration change
UniFi offers the consumer graded gear level of simple setup. Being prosumer graded system, it still has learning curve for home users yet its best in class GUI makes the process fun to play with.
In contrast, Aruba instant has the steepest learning curve with overwhelming amount of configuration options with some being actually only functional with subscription. However, the more I learned Aruba Instant UI, the more fun it becomes. The best feature of Aruba Instant is the real, true automatic RRM. As a home user, I can rely on Aruba Instant RRM and eliminate my manual tweaking. This saves me at least a few hours.
Ruckus Unleashed also offering automatic RRM, it does not work well to fix roaming or sticky client issue. So if you are unlucky one like myself and end up facing the issue, you will need to manually fix this by playing with various parameters one at a time.
Another downside of Ruckus Unleashed for my personal setup is its relative difficulty setting up Sonos in wireless configuration. This required me to go into command line interface and turn off QoS all together. The solution makes me wonder the actual impact to the whole system, so in the end Ruckus Unleashed setup forces me to use SonosNet setup rather than full wireless setup.
In summary, if you go with Aruba Instant, you are likely to be spending time on learning the system at beginning. If you go with UniFi, you will be spending whatever it takes to adjust RF parameters, and the amount of time you need varies significantly depending on the home WiFi setup and environment. If you choose Ruckus Unleashed, there maybe a chance you may need to spend significant amount of time manually configuration proper RF at beginning, and possibly to allow some client device to properly function.