[Network] UniFi vs. Ruckus Unleashed for Home WiFi | Part III: Feature Comparison

Introduction

As a casual network hobbyist, there are lot of features that I have not fully investigated on UniFi WiFi despite having been using it for over 3 years. Being so new to Ruckus Unleashed, there are lots of feature I have no clue about.

Rather than being comprehensive, this is my first impression of feature comparisons between two systems. Despite being only couple weeks of Ruckus Unleashed use, I think there are enough difference and similarities that exist between two systems.

Radio Resource Management

The main category of the feature that immediately became apparent to me that two are different is what I categorize as radio resource management (RRM) related. These are essentially features that help finding or setting up optimal WiFi parameters.

One of the fun and challenging part of WiFi network is the fact WiFi performance are highly affected by both static and dynamic environmental factors. So I believe there is no one size fits all setting if you are looking for an optimal WiFi performance. 

This is illustrated by the fact, enterprise graded gear’s cloud subscription emphasize AI driven radio resource management as one of their key feature offering. So what kind of tool does each setup provide for us?

Automatic Optimization of AP parameters

The most interesting one is automatic optimization of core access point parameters, which are:

• Channel selection
• Transmission Power selection (cell size)

UniFi

On UniFi side, there is nearly non-existent.

A while back, UniFi had what’s called WiFi AI. This was described as below.

This sounded a perfect automatic, enterprise graded radio resource management system. However, it never optimized anything and not infrequently users reported they actually made things worse.

In my personal use, I did not really notice much change in WiFi performance whether the good or bad.

However, if I looked at the actual result of WiFi AI efficacy, the WiFi AI ended up choosing the same channel for 2.4 GHz band for two APs that were located physically close to each other while both having maximum transmission power. This creates what’s called co-channel interference, and basically a bad idea. The way to avoid this is fairly simple for 2.4 GHz. Just choose a non-overlapping channel. In another word, manually one can start assigning 1, 6, and 11 to adjacent APs to eliminate this. It is worth mentioning despite transmission power on UniFi AP have “auto” as option, the auto was always “max” transmission and never adjusted anything.

Basically, I could walk around my home using Airmac (free app) on my iPhone and see what kind of WiFi signal I am getting from various APs in different part of my home, I see multiple UniFi APs on the same channel using max transmission power on 2.4 GHz band creating obvious co-channel interference.

Now, for UniFi’s defense, whether this had significant enough impact on my Wi-Fi performance or not is a bit hard to tell. Perhaps, some of the WiFi issue like B&W smart speaker disconnect could have been related to this. Perhaps some of IoT maybe having slower than optimal performance, but I didn’t dig deep enough. Instead, I manually set transmission powers and channels, and occasionally let WiFi AI run for fun. As of today 11/2023, UniFi no longer has this WiFi AI statement or screen, which certainly seemed to be misleading of what they were or weren’t doing.

Instead they have now changed the wording to simply say “Optimize channelization”, which selects channels.

This sounds like quite a downgrade from original WiFi AI, but it is more inline with what they can probably offer without having dedicated radio to survey each APs environment in real time.

So practically speaking, if you are seeing some suboptimal WiFi performance with Unifi and want to optimize, you most likely need to do them manually.

Ruckus

Despite Unleashed does not offer cloud controller level of sophisticated radio resource management, they do seem to support real radio resource management with automatic selection of channels and adjustment of transmission powers for each AP. Similar to UniFi setup, the easiest to check if the RRM is doing at least something reasonable is to look at 2.4 GHz band.

When I initially set up the APs in the evening, two APs picked the same channels on 2.4 GHz band. However, checking back next morning, they ended up being on the different channels. Then later adding the third AP, the same thing happened and next morning, all 3 were on the 3 different non-overlapping channels, 1, 6 and 11. Exactly, what I had expected the system to do if any type of RRM was taking place.

All Ruckus APs that I have check have a capability of real time background scanning, which means each APs can continue monitor its environment while continue serving WiFi. This way they know exactly what other APs are around them, how congested the WiFi network is during the specific time of the day and so on.

Since none of U6 APs have the dedicated radio for this, they have to stop WiFi service and use those antennas to survey its surrounding. However, this has a major drawback besides temporary loss of WiFi. That is the survey result is not a true reflection of actual WiFi environment because APs are stopped, clients are disconnected so no real WiFi network load information is lost. Adjusting APs parameters based on inaccurate data points certainly result in suboptimal configuration at the best.

Band Balancing

Band balancing refers to a technology deciding to balance # of clients on 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz on a given AP. Both UniFi and Ruckus supports band balance option.

However, UniFi does this is not clear. UniFi has just a checkbox to turn on or off. Honestly, I thought this was all to it when using UniFi; however, Ruckus showed me there is more depth to this.

Ruckus allows us to choose actual % of client that should be staying on 2.4 GHz band with more detailed explanation.

Load Balancing

Load balance is to balance number of clients connected to each APs. Only Ruckus seems to offer this.

Here, I had several questions when I saw what this does, but Ruckus’s documentation clearly stated what this does and answered all question came to my mind.

Private Pre-Shared Key

For example, for home user, one can use kids to have one password while adults to have different. All connects to the same SSID, but when kid’s password is used you can have that password direct to use content filtered VLAN while adult password use unfiltered VLAN.

Ruckus has had its own version of this technology, called dynamic pre-shared key (DPSK) for a very long time. DPSK have multiple additional features as this technology was really developed for cooperate use. 

For example, with DPSK, you can

• set password expiration timing
• let system to create random passwords upon the first time logging
• limit the number of clients who can use certain password

There are various potential use cases for this in home setting. For example, you can have each of family member have their own password. This allows easy identification of which device belongs to who.

You can be creative and use these extra features of DPSK to create guest access.

Guest WiFi

Although we could potentially use PPSK for guest WiFi access at home, it’s much easier to use dedicated guest WiFi setup on both systems.This feature allows easy creation of guest WiFi on both systems. This feature allows each clients on the guest SSID to be isolated, so they can’t communicate with other devices on the same SSID, as well as also preventing from accessing underlying wired network devices.

Each have ability to have customizable captive screen options for guest WiFi including option to use social media log for authentication.

I’ve tried setting up both. Both worked as intended and was fairly easy to setup. 

GUI

Nice graphical user interface alone can be important factor especially for attracting wider audience. Poorly designed user interface alone could make people to not wanting to use the application. UniFi has clean, what I feel stylish design. 

For example, they have topology screen that can even show animated dynamic data flow. Although this is technically a feature of UniFi network controller, if you use UniFi AP, all Wirelessly connected clients show up here as well.

In contrast, Ruckus’s unleashed controller screen looks very simple, and perhaps slightly misleading for the actual quality of the product.

These UI look like as if just programmers are created without involvement of Graphic Designers final touch or makeover. Functionally, they work great. Navigation is also very intuitive. I do not believe there is any data that I can’t find on Ruckus that UniFi has. They just does not look as stylish.

This maybe due to the product’s target audience difference. While UniFi’s primary audience seems prosumer and small business market targeted pros, Ruckus’s heart is hospitality and schools where hundreds of APs are being deployed. So those who set up Ruckus’s APs are more likely to be a true dedicated WiFi or system engineers and their background maybe more closer to computer programmers, who cares less of visual than the functionality. Did I say I used to work as software engineer long time ago?

It’s worth noting that despite UniFi has more stylish GUI, but they have more visual related bugs.

Although topology map has improved and became far more accurate than used to be, I still see certain wired device suddenly disappearing from topology.

Nonetheless, I still hope Ruckus unleashed have a bit more stylish look.

Both UniFi and Ruckus have mobile apps if that that’s the way to control your network. I have not used much of either one. But it looks like both ones have somewhat feature limitation compared to the full admin menu accessed through the browser.

Summary

In summary, although both UniFi and Ruckus Unleashed are feature rich products especially if you are coming from the consumer gear, Ruckus Unleashed take the feature level entirely to the next level. One such main difference is illustrated by true radio resource management features on Ruckus Unleashed.

I believe this feature is only possible because of Ruckus Access Point’s internal hardware allowing essential real time WiFi environment scan around each access points. UniFi used to try or considered this approach as shown with their older APs such as SHD and XG models, but they were considerably more expensive than other APs from the generation. Although it is indeed an awesome technology and feature, regular home user may not see much practical gain from optimization unless you have several access points and relatively WiFi noisy neighbors.