Replacing Ubiquiti UAP-XG with a used Ruckus R710

My Ubiquiti UAP-XG RF performance was pretty poor, and since I found Ruckus R710 APs used for only $120 each, I decided to give them a try.

One access point now has substantially improved coverage in my house, resulted in stronger reported signal strength on client devices, and anecdotally, I get better/more consistent ping times, lower latency, higher throughput, on mulitple devices. (And I replaced my other Ubiquiti access points too, because of the price point.)

I’ve heard of problems with iOS devices - fixed with 200.8.10.3.278, but my ThinkPads (upgraded to Intel AX200 cards) and Pixel phones have worked really well with these access points on ZoneDirector 12.4.

I had an existing Ubiquiti ceiling mount already in my ceiling, and no desire to drill more holes. So I managed to secure the Ruckus mount (902-0120-0000) onto my universal Ubiquiti ceiling mount (U-PRO-MP). I used the two screws and bolts from the Ubiquiti ceiling mount plate in two “C” holes. If you have another screw, you could also use “B” to further secure it. This places the head of the screws against the drywall, and I needed to loosen the Ruckus mounting poles slightly to ensure the AP fit against the U-PRO-MP, since it has a bit of a lip. This meant I could avoid securing this into the ceiling, and this was anchored with the mounting plate in the attic.

The CAT6A I had running to the mount has a thick sleeve on it, which prevented it from plugging into the R710. So I added a CAT6 coupler and a thinner cable, to avoid having to re-run the drop.

I also had to force the AP to negotiate 802.3at PoE+ since the auto-detect seemed to push it to 802.3af against my ICX7450.

Unfortunately, I also needed to set up LACP to get the 2Gbps bonded performance to the access point, but the loss of the 10Gbps connection hasn’t been too much of a problem, since I never actually observed my UAP-XG actually pushing more than 100MB/s transfers even with 4 simultaneous clients.

When I upgrade to a multi-gig access point, the ICX7450 switch I’m using only does 1Gbps/10Gbps, so I’ll have to keep the LACP until I find something with multi-gig N-BaseT support at a reasonable price.

LACP Configuration ¹

I have mine managed with a ZD-1200, but LACP only seems to be configurable via SSH directly to the access point.

On the Access Point

set bond bond0 enable
set bondparam bond0 add eth0
set bondparam bond0 add eth1
set bondparam bond0 xmit-hash 2
set bondparam bond0 lacp-rate 1

See the documentation for details on the xmit-hash and pick the appropriate option for your environment.

On the Brocade switch

I used 1/1/1 and 1/1/11 for the access point in this example.

lag ceiling-ap dynamic id 1
ports eth 1/1/1 eth 1/1/11
primary-port 1/1/1
port-name Ceiling-AP eth 1/1/1

If things stop working while you’re configuring, you can probably connect the primary/PoE AP patch back into a non-LACP port and re-establish SSH to continue making changes.

Confirm LACP on the Access Point

rkscli: get bond
LACP/Bonding is ENABLED.
<bond0>
        Mode:           8023AD
        LACP-rate:      fast
        MII-Mon:        100 (ms)
        Xmit-Hash:      layer2+3
        Slaves:         2
        Slave-0:        eth0, ACTIVE, UP, link-fail-count: 0
        Slave-1:        eth1, ACTIVE, UP, link-fail-count: 0
OK

Done!