adam reeve

As I mentioned a while ago, I recently spent some time on the SlimDevices stand at the DigitalLife show in NYC. The stand was actually being shared by two other companies – Infrant (makers of some excellent NAS units) and Ruckus Wireless, who were demonstrating their new (award winning!) line of wireless routers and adapters. Read on for my thoughts on the Ruckus products.

Whilst the convenience of wireless access in the home is undeniable, in most cases the technology is far from perfect. Slow transfers, dropouts and frequent reconnections are common experiences for most users. The frequency band used by 802.11b/g networks is shared with cordless phones, microwave ovens and many other sources of interference. Couple this with the sheer number of nearby networks competing for airtime (in my apartment I can detect over 10 seperate base stations) and it’s a miracle it works at all!

Now, with the advent of IPTV, Windows Media Center and products such as the Xbox 360 which allow HD video streaming in the home, people are expecting more and more out of their wireless networks, and in many cases they simply can’t deliver. The Ruckus products are designed specifically with this in mind and aim to allow full bandwidth HD video streaming whilst still being compatible with existing 802.11b/g devices. The secret lies in their unique antenna – a large flat disc which fits in the top of the unit – which actually contains many seperate transmitters pointing in all directions. The router constantly monitors for interference and signal loss, and switches between transmitters to “steer around” the obstruction. In theory, this will help the router provide a stronger, more reliable connection.

So how does it work in practise? Well, at DigitalLife we had a demo unit set up which was streaming a full screen HD video over a wireless link to a large plasma panel. That in itself is pretty impressive, most consumer wireless gear simply can’t provide that level of performance. Not only did it work, but it worked flawlessly. I watched that video for hours and never saw a single skip, glitch or other problem – and remember – this is in the middle of a noisy exhibition hall with who-knows-how-many other networks in operation.

Yesterday I received a unit at home and was able to give it a more thorough inspection. Firstly, yes, it looks kinda weird. Certainly not bad, and it would be at home next to some trendy white Mac Mini, but it does look a little out of place on my strictly utilitarian equipment shelf. At the show we took to introducing it as a microwave powered nail polish drier   That aside it’s a nice piece of equipment with solid build quality. Nothing fancy on the back, just the usual 4 LAN and 1 WAN ethernet ports (10/100 auto-sensing), power, a reset hole and a small button for auto-setup (which according to the manual isn’t enabled). The front of the device is more colourful. As well as the usual lights for power & ethernet, there are also indicators for wireless association (i.e. is anything connected to the router?) and signal strength. The top of the unit has a translucent panel which lights up continually to indicate which of the transmitters are in use. I can’t see the top of my router unless I stand on a stool, and to be honest I’m kind of glad about that – the flickering from the lights could drive me crazy. But it’s neat to see the unit “pointing” at the devices it’s talking to, and it makes for a great demo.

Hooking it up and configuring the various network settings was very easy thanks to what has to be the best web configuration screen I’ve ever used for this type of device. It’s fast, good looking, well laid out and has excellent online help for every option. There’s full support for most of the usual consumer router features, such as WEP & WPA security, DHCP, portforwarding etc. Some things I didn’t see include support for dynamic DNS services such as DynDNS, and access control/filtering. Neither of those features are useful to me, but maybe they’ll come in a future firmware upgrade.

So now the million dollar question – does it work better than a “normal” router? Without a doubt, yes. I was previously using a Netgear WGR614 – a very common unit which is generally considered one of the better 802.11g models. Testing using the Iperf bandwidth measurement tool showed that the Netgear got a perfectly respectable 14mbps between my office (where the router is located) and the living room. This is a distance of around 30 feet through 2 walls and a kitchen. Nothing to complain about there – I spend time configuring my network gear to get the best possible performance and that number’s likely to be better than a lot of people see. Switching to the Ruckus (with the default settings) gave an immediate jump to 19.5mbps – that’s more than a 30% increase! The bandwidth was also very stable, maintaining the same rate over a test lasting 20 minutes.

In summary, if you want increased wireless bandwidth for video (or anything else) or are experiencing serious interference problems with your existing setup, I can highly recommend this unit. It’s not as cheap as the standard units from D-Link, Netgear, Belkin, etc but the quality shows through.