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 rent 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 why
less upgrades instead of some of that other stuff it's just too bad that the
unit I showed off last time costs ,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 xclaim
xi3 your next wireless access point
Kingston's KC 310 business class ssds deliver massive capacities firmware
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more so when you open the box for an xi3
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 it took me a while to figure
that out cuz my pick my jaw up off the floor so you get a power over Ethernet
injector a $15 value some mounting hardware a little key for removing the
unit from the aform mened mounting hardware and an Ethernet cable and then
in most cases I guess probably also the xi3 Andor access point itself and let's
talk about this sucker for a minute shall we the hardware actually looks
pretty familiar but I guess it's not exactly a top secret that xclaim is a
daughter company of ruckus the makers of the super awesome and 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 ruckus's 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 raw specs wise the xi3 looks
pretty darn similar to The Ruckus R500
it's got the same 2x2 antenna config with the same power output it can handle
the same N300 megabit speeds on 2.4 GHz
and AC 867 on 5 GHz and even the power
draw is rated exactly the same I mean sure the 500 client advertised capacity
has been toned down to 100 and along with the other feature trimming very
notably the removal of beam Flex plus ruckus's proprietary tech for punching
through interference and barriers more easily there is no compatibility with
rasist 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 xclaim figures any more
than 10 APS and you're probably overdoing it and you should move up 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 for xclaim app password protect the app which by
the way Touch ID support on iOS is 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 xclaim
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 a plug 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 GHz if you intend to use this at home so you can manually reserve the faster 5
GHz band for devices that matter and leave 2.4 GHz to non-performance
sensitive ones instead of relying on the ap's band steering to decide for you and
muck 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 ruckus's
Channel fly technology hop around
according to whichever has the least congestion a feature uh whose
functionality I was surprised to discover when I cracked open my wipy and
saw it flopping around like a Mexican jumping bean in our crowded 2.4 GHz
environment and one that I'm not 100% sure how I feel about since not being on
one six 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 for dummies 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 GHz new settings from the app are
applied nearly immediately clients connect almost instantly compared to
that horrendous leg 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 manag to Employments 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 xclaim 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 hiding terms like 20 mahz 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 they it needs like a OneTouch guest network
setup 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 grade 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 reason 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 leeching bandwidth off the network
or something like that I mean wand doesn't care about packets unless they're catchup 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 ruckus's PoE
deployment making better positioning much more possible since you're not
reliant on a power jack nearby and
ruckus's ability to not have the hardware fold like a cheap suit once a
couple of video streams start flying around over a fancy looking enclosure
and big strongl looking external
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them out so I think that's pretty much it guys like this video if you liked it
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he