In another fine stray dog of an episode, Jim and John chose violence...kind of.
It's a controller cage match, as our pair of mutts discuss the merits of virtual SmartZones, RUCKUS One, and RUCKUS Unleashed as controller platforms.
3 rounds wasn't quite enough, as things even required sudden death!
Also...vote for the show (Jim and John) as content contributors of the year for The Wi-Fi Awards here: https://thewifiawards.com/
Intro music by Alex Grohl, available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsRWpx8VJ_E
and
https://pixabay.com/users/alexgrohl-25289918/
In another fine stray dog of an episode, Jim and John chose violence...kind of.
It's a controller cage match, as our pair of mutts discuss the merits of virtual SmartZones, RUCKUS One, and RUCKUS Unleashed as controller platforms.
3 rounds wasn't quite enough, as things even required sudden death!
Also...vote for the show (Jim and John) as content contributors of the year for The Wi-Fi Awards here: https://thewifiawards.com/
Intro music by Alex Grohl, available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsRWpx8VJ_E
and
https://pixabay.com/users/alexgrohl-25289918/
John Deegan: Good day, Mr. Palmer. How are you, sir?
Jim Palmer: Good day to you, Mr. John.
John Deegan: I'm trying to do time zone, not important greetings, um, in case, in case that triggers you. How are you, sir? It's been, it's been a hot minute since we talked.
Jim Palmer: It has been, and I'm, I'm doing quite well.
Thank you for asking.
John Deegan: That’s good.
Jim Palmer: So what do we got on the, on the topics today?
John Deegan: We it's a stray dog. It's going to be a stray dog. We we're coming to the end of the year. We can admit that and and people are I think people are starting to hibernate. I'm not really sure, but we can't get people to join us. So it's a stray dog. You're stuck with me and Jim, which is, well, I'm happy for it.
I don't, I don't consider it to be stuck, but.
Jim Palmer: Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's getting into the point where trying to coordinate and schedule is, you know, for a producer, you know, the, you know, the pain of scheduling. So, yeah, so today it's just going to be you and I, and I thought what we could do today is I want to do a controller cage match.
In the past, we did some like picking our favorites, but today I want to put in, I want to put the controller platforms into a ring and we're going to fight it out and we're going to, I'm going to keep score and we're going to come up with a winner in 30 minutes or less. 30 minutes or less. 30 minutes.
John Deegan: What are you? Okay. All right. I feel like I've been, I feel like, I feel like I've been picked on.
Jim Palmer: Well, we'll never get, we'll never get it under 30 minutes, but we can dream.
John Deegan: Sure. All right. So. Controller cage match it is.
Jim Palmer: So, let's, let's, let's, let's outline our contestants in our cage match.
John Deegan: Sure. What do we got?
We got looks like we're looking at SmartZone, virtual.
Jim Palmer: So that would be, so we're going to call that the orange corner.
John Deegan: Orange corner,
okay. And then you've got RUCKUS One, here's forward, refer to, and we're going to call that RUCKUS R1, moving forward just to make it a little bit easier. And then we've got Unleashed.
Jim Palmer: I don't have a color for Unleashed.
John Deegan: How about red like your shirt that nobody else can see?
Jim Palmer: Yeah, we'll do the red corner.
John Deegan: Okay. So, with that said, I guess we'll ring the bell and we'll get started. This should be fun. Ready? Here we go. Love that bell. Okay. So, round one.
Jim Palmer: We're going to talk about ease of setup.
John Deegan: This is a good one.
Jim Palmer: So out of the orange corner with, with, we're going to, we'll go with the virtual SmartZone, understanding that there is an appliance, but for this, for this battle, for this competition, we're going to go with a virtual SmartZone. Ease of setup. What do you think, John?
John Deegan: If we're doing this on like a scale of one to 10, I'd say this is probably like, I don't know, like a five.
It's not impossible to set up, but knowing what it's going up against, it's not going to be the easiest of the three. It's got the most moving parts is, is, you know, you've got, if you're dealing with a home lab, it's really easy, you've got no firewall rules. It's a, you throw it on a nook and it's running.
If you're talking about throwing it lab in a corporate environment or production you'll have firewall rules. You'll have other, you know, if you're dealing with GCE or AWS or anything like that, you're going to have to spin up an instance. There's more moving parts. It's just, that's the reality of it.
And then you've got. A whole lot of power under the hood of the virtual SmartZone. It's just, it's not, I don't want to be daunting about it, but the reality is, if you're going to set up a new vSZ, you're booking yourself for a couple hours, probably.
Jim Palmer: And I, but you know, but I will say that the first one is always the hardest.
John Deegan: That is true.
Jim Palmer: And that's going to be, that's going to be true for the three, our three contenders. The first time you do it, it always is a little more, you know, it takes more time. But I think. Especially with virtual SmartZone, once you kind of have done it and you've made all the mistakes as you go through the setup of a virtual SmartZone, I think once you've done it the first time you kind of know like, oh, I have to set the number of interfaces, which is when you're doing a high scale controller.
It's especially true, you know, a lot of people are like, I have to use three interfaces. Well, you don't have to, but you usually end up screwing that, you know, you do that the first time you screw it up and then you realize, Oh, I got to blow away and start over again. But this time in the setup, I do it this way.
John Deegan: I only did it a few times.
Jim Palmer: Yes. What, what? There's a, there's a comment about TCP is one-to-one UDP is one to many and multicast, is you configured it wrong again. So for setting up, for setting up a virtual SmartZone, there are guides. So if, if you're willing to sort of put your ego in check and go read the guide, the guides will walk you through it and it's not as bad.
But I think to your point, when we compare 'em to our other competitors, it does come in last place. So for, for this round, I would give, I would score, I think you're right. I would score the vSZ a five.
John Deegan: Yup. Next we've got R1. Now I'll admit I haven't done a whole lot with, with RUCKUS One. I haven't, I've touched the cloud.
I've used the cloud and RUCKUS One being the evolution of the cloud product. I will say this about that in terms of ease of use. In terms of getting it up and running, five minutes, if that.
Jim Palmer: R1 cheats, R1 cheats because it's already done. We do the work for you. So when you, when we talk about the, you know, the ease of setup with, you know, accessing, you know, getting access to the controller adding hardware and doing all the other stuff that you do when you're like, you first stand something up, R1 is probably the easiest.
And, and it's built that way because we do all the work for you. So I would, I would come in and I would give R1. A nine. I mean it's, I, I'm, I'm really picky so I'm never gonna give anything a 10. So nine's probably the highest out I'll ever go
John Deegan: see. I was gonna give it a 10, but you know, I won't, I won't argue with the nine 'cause it's gonna be the best of the group. I'll…
Jim Palmer: How about we go 9.5 on this.
John Deegan: There you go. I'll put it this way, and this is what popped in my head when we were talking about this of the three, and I don't wanna cheat unleashed out of any attention. It's gonna get some soon. If I were in a pickle on a customer's site and I needed to get an AP running and just, just AP running, and I had this happen to me a couple years ago where I needed to get an SSID out to be tested for, I call it QA. Wasn't going to do SmartZone. RUCKUS One or Unleashed is where it's at because that's up and running really, really fast depending on the requirements. I mean, it's basically what you key in the serial number to the RUCKUS Cloud site. I don't know if R1 is a little bit different.
That used to be RUCKUS Cloud, but it's just like Jim said, we do all the heavy lifting. We do all the heavy lifting for you. It's, it's just incredibly, it's incredibly powerful and incredibly simple.
Jim Palmer: And in your scenario of, hey, I have to, I have an AP, I need to get it up and running. If you have the RUCKUS One mobile app, you can literally click it on your phone.
You, it opens, you can do an add an AP or an add a switch, you scan the barcode for the serial number. It pulls the serial number up and says, hey, this serial number is going to be associated to your RUCKUS One venue. And so then you plug the thing in, and by the time You have everything else built, the AP is called in, it's registered, it does a firmware upgrade, and you can be up and running incredibly fast.
Now, this is all dependent on, in your scenario, I have an, I have access to the internet, I have that, you know, I have an internet connection, so then that works. So, it is, it's, it's quick, it's easy, everything is really intuitive and done for you, so.
John Deegan: Which then leaves us
Jim Palmer: 9. 5 for RUCKUS One.
John Deegan: Which leaves us with Unleashed.
And out of the gate I would say I'd give this a solid 7. 5. Only because, I mean I could probably go 8. It's not, it's easier than the vSZ, it's not as easy as RUCKUS One. You do have to do some work. But the, I would say there's not a lot of resistance. It's not, if you're, if you are somebody who's done home networks before and you've, you've configured a home wireless network The Unleashed interface to me, it felt very similar to that.
And it's incredibly powerful, what you can do with that as well. I'm going to use that saying a lot, I'm going to get in trouble. But it really is, I mean, at the end of the day, what you're getting, you're getting a really solid AP with regardless of what platform you run it on. You're not losing anything by running it on RUCKUS One versus Unleashed versus SmartZone.
It's more about how you want to run them long term. I think it's probably the best way to put it, but I mean, I love Unleashed. It saved my bacon a couple times. It just takes a little bit longer to get running than RUCKUS One.
Jim Palmer: So the nice thing about, I mean, the long part is actually just, you have to go get the firmware for Unleashed for your AP model and then you, you web into it using, you know, the IP address that it gets from a DHCP server, which if you're not used to it, trying to figure out, hey, what IP address did my DHCP server hand out?
If you're comfortable with that, you get it in seconds. If you're not, it might take you a little bit longer. But then you have the time of just because the, I'll tell you what, doing I've been doing it a lot over the past couple of weeks. Loading the firmware is about as simple and easy as you can make it.
The problem that you have is just the time of it takes to do the firmware upgrade. But once you have that done, and it reboots, and it comes up in Unleashed, there's a wizard that walks you through building everything. So by the time the thing actually reboots, you know, when it, when it, when it does its final Unleashed configuration stuff, the SSID is up and running already.
I mean, you pretty much know it's done when you look, you go, Oh, look, there's my SSID. So from that end. You know, just simply because of the, the effort of having to do the firmware upgrade and the two reboots on it in order to make the AP work at Unleashed, I would give it a 7. So with you saying 7. 5 rate, I'm going to go with a 7.5.
John Deegan: That's fair. So it looks like round one, I think, is in the books. And round one goes to RUCKUS One. Which takes us to round two, the Nerd Knobs. How configurable Is the platform, how much effort do you need or not need to get each one of these to be where you want it to be? And are there enough of them among other things?
So kind of going in the same order.
Jim Palmer: Fighting out of the orange corner
John Deegan: For the virtual SmartZone. What say you, Mr. Palmer, we'll, we'll flip it. We'll let you give the scores this time first.
Jim Palmer: So, for this one, I'm going to put a caveat. We're going to talk about the latest well, the latest as of right now, which is 6.1.2, but 6.1 and 6.1.1 and 6.1, those are all pretty, the user interface is pretty much the same. So, for the amount of nerd knobs you get from the virtual SmartZone, I would actually rate that about as high as you, I would, I would give that one a 9.5. However, I am going to cut down my score by the, the ease.
It's SmartZone. is expert friendly, which is cool because it's really kind of, especially the virtual SmartZone high scale is really kind of built for experts. So I'm going to, but I'm going to knock it down just a little bit and I'm going to come off my 9.5 for the nerd knobs because there's enough, but sometimes even you and I can struggle with trying to find out like, hey, where's my AP registration rules?
Where are some of the other things? It takes a little bit of clicking. So I'm going to come in for the virtual SmartZone. I'm going to give it a solid Eight is where my score for the nerd knobs.
John Deegan: Okay. Now for me, I think I'm scoring this compared to the other two. So I'd actually give it a 10 in the group, but I'll, I'll settle with a nine.
If you want to go down to an eight to me, this is the best of the bunch, not to spoil the votes, but, and the reason for that is. If you want NerdKnobs, this is the platform you deploy from a RUCKUS controller's perspective. This is everything that we can do, everything that you can tune, whether it's at the controller level, at the zone level, at the AP group level.
You've got any bit of granularity you could possibly want. If you want the granularity, If it doesn't exist anywhere else, it's going to exist in the vSZ, especially the high scale, like Jim said. If it doesn't exist there, we don't have it yet, or it's not deployed, probably. I'm not PLM, so don't crucify me if I've got that wrong, but it's basically, if you're the enterprise customer and you want to have as much control and flexibility as possible to run anything in the world, you're going high scale.
Jim Palmer: Yes. But, and so for feature level, I gave it a 10.
John Deegan: But, but to your point, it's feature level 10 ease of use, which is user interfaces is our next one, but you do need to know what you're doing and then. That goes to, to the point of everything, right? You need to know what you're doing. There's a lot in there.
And if you don't know what you're doing and you don't RTFM, you can turn the knobs the wrong way and have unintended consequences and not good unintended consequences. So, you know, be careful, but for those other ones,
maybe you look at.
Jim Palmer: So I'm gonna, I'm gonna come up a little bit based on your argument, and I'm willing to give the virtual SmartZone for the nerd knob round, I'm willing to give that one a nine.
John Deegan: That's fair.
I mean nothing's, I agree with you that it's it should be really hard to get a ten. I only gave it my initial ten based on the competition, but Nothing's perfect. And I'm sure people listening are going to say, there's always room for improvement, even with us. But that said, it's up against two others.
So how do RUCKUS One and Unleashed later stack up to the Nerd Knobs?
Jim Palmer: And, you know, we got to give a little caveat to the RUCKUS One platform on this one, because it's not necessary. It's It's primary focus is not the, even though it can be used for the uber or high end, you know, I'm, I'm a CWNE times three type of person.
It can be used for that, but it's focus is not as much for that as it is sort of, it's also mixed into the SMBs and to some a little bit smaller ones. So for the nerd knobs, I'm going to give RUCKUS one, I'm going to give that one an 8.5. And. With the new interface, I'm even going to give like how hard is it to find them.
Once you kind of get over that initial learning curve of, hey, where does this, you know, is it the venue? Is it the AP? Is it the WLAN? Or the switch. Once you kind of get over that little hump, finding them is actually pretty intuitive. So, It's, I don't think it's, it's not quite as good as the virtual SmartZone High Scale.
I think you and I agree on that, but for RUCKUS One, I would give it an 8.5.
John Deegan: And you know what? I'm going to be lazy here, and I'm going to agree, 8.5 seems fair. Admittedly, I don't have as much time in the seat behind RUCKUS One as I do with High Scale. But having conversations with the product side folks, I feel like High Scale has a very specific niche.
I happen to support a vertical that it is really, really good for. But there are plenty of customers, enterprise to SMBs and beyond, that R1 will give you more than ample configurability without, as Jim said, like, Where is it? Is it hard to find? Is it an obscure setting that I've got to do, like, right hand green, left foot yellow to find it?
Like, it's, it's streamlined and we'll get to some more of that in the user interface, because there's, there's definitely some to touch on there. But it's, it's a very powerful platform, and I think the biggest appeal to me, nerd knobs and otherwise, about RUCKUS One is that it's, it's only about a year old, I think.
I think I'm getting the birthday right. Less than a year old. I think it was officially kind of unleashed. Sorry to steal that thunder. On the Wi Fi world beginning of this year, actually, in 2023. But it's basically getting constantly developed for. And that's not to say that the other platforms aren't.
But because of the nature of the way that that platform comes together in our world it's very, I think they're doing a very good job of keeping it very up to date. More rapidly. I think there's, there's a lot more flexibility there. Just the nature of the code base and whatnot. I'm sure if we had one of those PLMs on, they would give us the whole rundown of what it is, and maybe that's a future episode, but I think this is a strong 8.5 and I would say don't sleep on it because honestly, at the end of the day, I've seen, I've seen enterprise, major enterprise customers have this. Pitched to them and they were very intrigued because I think the benefits, what it doesn't require from round one and the fact that you get a lot of what you get from the high scale.
I mean, there's a lot, there's a lot to like about this product and I think you're going to be hearing a lot more about it in the future. .
Jim Palmer: And to be fair and full disclaimer, John and I are CWNEs, and so we really do, you know, the, the expert friendly stuff doesn't really bother us. We like, we like that.
And so we are sort of skewed a little bit in that regard to Smart Zone. But you, I agree with you. RUCKUS one is, is starting with the work that they've been doing and how it's, and how it's coming along. I don't. I think if we were to do this in a year from now, we might actually, they might be in a dead heat for this kind, for this category.
John Deegan: So, and, and I, and the beauty part too is we, we often see vendors make products for particular, like, this is gonna be for this cus customer size, and this is gonna be for this one and that's gonna be for this one. And they sort of silo it off. And I think what we've done here is created another platform that you basically could be using either R1 or SmartZone and it's pick your poison, effectively.
And one thing I think we kind of, maybe we did touch on it, maybe we didn't, it goes back to round one. So RUCKUS One is all cloud. You don't have to stand a server up, which is really appealing to a lot of people. It's, it's scary to some others, but, and, and what we didn't, and I'm going to segue into Unleashed.
What we didn't mention with Unleashed is if you have like three RUCKUS APs, you have an Unleashed server. One of those APs becomes the server. You don't need a server. You don't need a cloud instance. It's a self contained network, which is really, really cool. So a little bit of an extra point for Unleashed.
You still didn't win that round, but. How does Unleashed stack up on the Nerd Knobs?
Jim Palmer: So, fighting out of the red corner, we have Unleashed. And, again, I have to, I have to flavor this. I have to color this a little bit. With, you know, because of what Unleashed is, it's never going to compete against RUCKUS One.
It's never going to compete against any SmartZone. But it's not meant to. It's not designed to. And so, because of that, when we take a look at the nerd knobs and the amount of features that come with Unleashed, I think it's punching well above its weight. I think it's, you know, It's, it's not that little stripped down TP Link type of experience that you can get.
You can actually do a ton of stuff with Unleashed, but again, that also kind of hurts it a little bit because people kind of expect the TP Link type of experience, but because the features are so much Then it, it, it, it sort of skews its score, I think, in this round. I don't think from a, from a feature perspective, it gets it really high, but because of just, I mean, I'm amazed every day at what I learned, what else that Unleashed can do.
So. To give it a number, I'm going to have to give it actually a 7.5. And what, but from the, and understand from a feature perspective and the nerd knobs for what it is, it's a 10. However, for who ends up using it? Sometimes it's a little overwhelming and there's too much in there. And so the ease of use, how hard it is to run it and stuff like that.
And the ability to screw up the nerd knobs, I think knocks it down. It's if you are expert friendly, if you spend the time, then that thing is punching well above its weight. And I think it really competes against the other ones, but I'm going to give it a 7.5,
John.
John Deegan: So I was, I was kind of torn. I was thinking 7.5 or 8. As with. R1, it's another product or controller line, if you will, that I don't have as much time behind, but I will say I kind of hold a special place for Unleashed. It saved my bacon, as I mentioned before. I had a customer site. I needed to do some testing in the lab. They didn't have a controller that could reach the lab.
It was a very isolated. You know, segmented part of the network R1 wasn't out at that point in time and cloud wasn't going to cut it just because of the access restrictions and whatnot. So I had a couple APs, Unleashed was the way to go and to be able to download the code to get it set up, all I needed to do was configure an SSID or two, I think we turned on a couple of radios and that was, we were off to the races.
So it's not the sexiest of interfaces. Which again, that's, I'm cheating. That's round three. I think it gives you enough and I could better otherwise to me when I popped into that the first time I'm like, this feels like the old. Not that it looks old, but like, it feels like the old home networks that I used to maintain.
It felt kind of more like that. So I think the transition for somebody is probably not that bad. You have enough control to make it work, but if you're a power user, you're going to be probably more frustrated because there's things that you just can't do or can't do as easily. I think that's how I would, how I would kind of put it.
So I'd say 7.5, I wouldn't, I wouldn't argue with that. It's, I liked how you said it. It's punching above its weight class. And what the, what I would underscore my last comment on this one, SEs and, and, and Jim has it too, like a lot of the RUCKUS employees that have to work on this, we get the gear because we need to use it.
We, you know, we eat our own dog food, but when the RUCKUS employees leave and they keep the APs because, you know, they're two generations old or whatever, but they're still running their house, Unleashed is the software they go to. It's. doesn't have a cost to it. There's no, I don't have to pay for a license.
It runs my APs in perpetuity until the APs die or you decide you want to get Wi Fi 12. It's going to run. So to me, that speaks volumes about what it is capable of. And it's, it's just kind of worth throwing out there as a benefit. There's a cost to R1. There's a cost of vSZ. There's no cost to Unleashed.
So I think whether that lands in the nerd knobs or some other intangibles, I think it's worth mentioning. It does punch above its weight class there.
Jim Palmer: So I'm going to raise my score and give it from a 7.5. I I'm comfortable with an 8 on this one.
John Deegan: See this, this is, I work in sales,
Jim Palmer: but unfortunately, unfortunately, you know, for, for a nerd knob for round two, this round goes to the vSZ.
John Deegan: Okay. Well, that leaves us one round or does it the user interface?
Jim Palmer: User interface. So. John, you want to start us off out of the orange corner with the vSZ?
John Deegan: Sure. Again, I'm biased. I think this is a clean interface. When we went to 6.0 code we did do a UI overhaul. And of course, I got used to 5.2.2. And then as soon as I started to go into 6.0, I was like, whoa! But the neat thing, even though there's a default skin, is you can actually change that back to the default 522 old view, legacy view, I think it's called. I like it. I'm used to it. I think with a lot of these, it's something you use on a regular basis, you get used to it, you get comfortable.
So, I'm trying not to let my familiarity kind of cloud my opinion. But I think it's a really clean interface. The one thing, and Jim alluded to it earlier Maybe some of the things are a little bit more buried than you'd like, but that's only because there's a lot of options. It goes back to the nerd knobs, that's why it won round two.
There's a lot of nerd knobs, so they've got to go somewhere. You know, you can search and you can actually set favorites. If there's sections of the, the interface that you're in a lot, you can make it a favorite. It makes it a little bit easier to find. It's the, it's the sort of the, the side effect of having a very, very feature rich controller platform.
So for a score, I'll go an eight. I think it's good. But it's not the. To me, it's not the best in this round.
Jim Palmer: You know, I kind of like the vSZ interface. I agree that, you know, it was a little bit of an extra learning curve to get from the, from the, when it went from the 5.2 to the 6.0. So there was a little bit of that curve.
So in that regard, I'm going to, you know, I don't know. I mean, and part of the problem is the competitors in this round really kind of come out swinging. And so I gotta, I gotta have to separate that out in my mind. And for this round, i, you know, 8.5. I mean,
John Deegan: I mean, that's fair.
Jim Palmer: Again, it's, and, and, and I think part of it is once you get used to it, just kind of like with standing up standing up a vSZ, you know, if you've done it a hundred times, you know, you're like, oh, I can spin up a vSZ faster than I can do anything else.
Well, because that's what you're used to. So I think, I think for that, you know, I'm going to give it an 8. 5. The reason why I will knock it down a little bit is because of the one thing that it's kind of missing that people are expecting nowadays is the mobile app, which we can now talk about a little bit more because the other competitors in this round each have a mobile app and the vSZ doesn't, which from a security perspective, I can see why not, but it does limit your ability to interface and use the platform.
So I would give the vSZ an 8.5 on this one.
John Deegan: No, that's fair. Which then leads us to R1.
Jim Palmer: Out of the black corner.
John Deegan: Right out of the gate. I honestly feel like R1 lands at about a 9. And, and the reason for this, I have a couple reasons. Number one, It's the newest skinned platform we have, right? It's, it's, you know, less than a year old.
It's still got the new car smell. I think you can tell that they've put a lot of effort into making the user interface. I don't want to, very nice as the, is the, the, the most generic way I can put it. The other thing I'm going to get into, and I'll let you have the web app side of it. The other thing that I like about R1 and part of the reason why I put it here is because with.
We have a lot of nice products, and yes, we're biased, it's a RUCKUS podcast, oh well. But we have a lot of nice platforms. You've got Cloudpath, you've got RUCKUS Analytics, which is now rebranded AI, to name a couple. And one of the goals with R1 is to get them all in basically a single pane of glass. To do that with the vSZ, I'm logging into separate web instances of Cloudpath.
And our AI and of the controller. And I've got three tabs in the web browser opener. I've got three screens on my monitor or whatever the case may be side by side. RUCKUS one ties them all together and makes it a more seamless experience for the end user. And I give them that extra bump for that. I think that's just, and we've, I've heard enough customers looking for that, that that kind of tipped it a little bit.
So I think it's, that's where I'm going with that. I think that's, that's. How I feel about RUCKUS One.
Jim Palmer: So 9.5?
John Deegan: I went with 9, but if you want to give it a 9.5.
Jim Palmer: So I gotta get, I give, I give extra credit to RUCKUS One because. One, it is a very slick looking new interface, the way they built the menus down the left hand side, I think really bumps it up.
The fact that it's now all sort of all in one, and it has the mobile UI, the, the app that you can put on your phone that you can then, you know, you're not going to be. doing day to day configuration on your phone, but if you're, if you are walking around, if you're at lunch and somebody gives you, and you get this call saying, hey, there's a problem, the mobile app gives you just enough information, you can do a quick check, and you'd be like, oh no, that AP is up and running in their area, and there's five clients connected to it, so if he's having a problem, it's more than likely his client device.
And so for that, you know, sort of the ease of the, the user interface for that you know. 9, 9.5. It's, it's, RUCKUS One is getting hard to beat.
John Deegan: That's fair. Which leaves us Unleashed. And how I will say this about Unleashed, I'm going to give it like a 5. It's a no frills interface. I'm not saying they don't put a lot of effort into it.
I'm not, I don't want to be disparaging to the, the, the developers. It's, it does what it needs to do. It's not going to win any beauty contests. It's not designed to. I mean, again, no cost, right? So it's. No frills, it works, it's clean enough, it's navigable, it does have a mobile app, which I did use, which did help me which I'll let you kind of get into more, but I would say of the three, it's not the belle of the ball, it's not going to win this one, it's just it can't it's, it's not intended to, it's, I think it's basically built to be, to be, I don't want to call it basic, it's definitely more than basic, but it's, it's purpose built, And that's it.
It's not going to win the beauty contest.
Jim Palmer: It's not. And, you know, and I think, whereas in the last round where, where Unleashed was punching well above its weight based on nerd knobs and features and stuff like that, when we compare it to say a TP Link or something else is, you know, for people running one or two APs.
It's, it takes a hit on this regard because it is sort of a very utilitarian interface. It has some of the inter, it doesn't have as much of the data and analytics as people are sort of expecting, but for what it is and what it does, I'm okay with it, but it does really kind of bring it, it drags it down a little bit.
The mobile app is really cool. You can, you can actually. Build a WLAN in the mobile app if you wanted to but it's more of a monitoring thing and you can look at, you can even incorporate switches, which I think then brings it back up because yeah, you can have a switch on your RUCKUS Unleashed network and you can see like, hey, which port is up, which port is down, stuff like that.
You cannot do any configuration on the mobile app for a switch, which then sort of pumps it down again. So, I'm kind of thinking like a, like a 5. 5 or 6 on this one.
John Deegan: Yep, I think that's fair.
Jim Palmer: Which is, you know, even if we, even if we say, Hey, we're going to give it a six, the problem is, is the competitors in this round, in this round are really hard to beat.
I mean, you're going up against some really high end competition here.
John Deegan: So we've gotten three rounds. Do we have a clear winner or do we have to go to sudden death?
Jim Palmer: From a, from just a round count. We do have a winner, which is RUCKUS One, believe it or not, which is kind of interesting because you and I are both primary virtual SmartZone users.
So the fact that we rated RUCKUS One, um, you know, is, is from a, from that perspective. But when we look at the actual scores and we do a score, you know, across the scores, we need to go to Sudden Death.
John Deegan: We like Sudden Death. So with that,
Jim Palmer: I do like Sudden Death.
John Deegan: Let's ring that bell one more time. What are the terms of sudden death, Jim?
What do we have to do? What are we, what's the parameters here?
Jim Palmer: Sudden death is sudden death. Like, you are, your feet is being held to the fire. I got to stand up a network. Who you picking? Who's your fighter? Which round are you, which corner are you going with on this one?
John Deegan: Oh man, I'm going to have to bust out the It Depends card.
I mean, if we're talking about, I've got a you know projectile based weapon pressed to my head and I've got to get something working right now, I might actually go unleashed. I was in a pickle. I was in a customer's, I mean, literally in an anechoic chamber. I think that's how you call it, you know, the Faraday cage.
I had to get Unleashed working, that was my only option, and it saved my butt. So I've, like I said, I've got a nice place in my fondness and my heart for RUCKUS Unleashed. RUCKUS One's pretty solid and it's not going to take a lot to get it running. If I've got a couple hours to get something stable and to really tune it in to do everything I want, I'd go with the SmartZone.
But in a pickle, I kind of think I'm going Unleashed.
Jim Palmer: Unfortunately I, again, it depends, right? If I don't have a internet connection, you know, if I'm, if I'm trying to stand something up, you know, and I'm like, I don't, I just need an, I need an SSID being broadcast to connect back to something else, then I'm going to go with Unleashed.
But if I have an internet connection, I'm going with RUCKUS One. And, you know, with the amount of people that think that Wi Fi means internet, I got to go with RUCKUS One in this one. So I would rank it. I'd rank RUCKUS One as number 1. My first choice, Unleashed, would be my second choice. And the SmartZone is my third choice.
Now, if we flip that and we say, hey, you get to pick. You have all the time in the world and you have no budget and you get to
John Deegan: SmartZone. Every day.
Jim Palmer: There you go. Do we have a winner, John?
John Deegan: I kind of feel like RUCKUS One is, is If it's not there, it's very close. And you've got the scorecard. I can see tallying up the points.
I mean, I think at the end of the day, I'll put it this way, and this is going to be so cheesy and it's going to be so Homer, but I think if you're the customer, there's one controller platform. There's not one, this is not like Lord of the Rings. There's not one controller platform to rule them all. But the beauty part is you've got three flavors of controllers that can do anything you need based on your particular needs at that point in time.
And, as we've covered on the Unsung Features of the RUCKUS World series we just released a couple weeks ago, all of these APs. Can run all of the code. All of these APs can work on any one of those platforms. So if you are blessed with the luxury of time, you can run vSZ. If you need to convert it to RUCKUS One or Unleashed, you can do that too.
So I think the winner is the customer. To really be the cheese ball here. Oh, so I had to do that. I really, I really had, I had to do that. Okay. But , but, but it's true. I mean, at the end of the day, I can buy a pallet of RUCKUS APs and run around any one of those three platforms based on what my needs are at that point in time for that project.
Jim Palmer: And you'll, and you're not gonna be disappointed.
John Deegan: No. And and, and ultimately the other part of it too is you can graduate, right? If you buy. Whether it's your home lab or you, let me say I'm a doctor. I start as a small business and, and which is not uncommon. You can have a RUCKUS deployment, which is three APs and you get really, really good at your job.
And you go from one office to three to five to 500 and you go Unleashed isn't cutting it anymore. RUCKUS one, I'd rather do my own thing. I'm going to graduate to a vSZ. It can grow with you. That's pretty cool. So that's, that's where I'm at with that. I think, I think Customers win, but I think RUCKUS One, like I said, watch, keep watching for RUCKUS One.
This is going to be really, really big coming up. I think it's, it's growing.
Jim Palmer: You know, the funny, the funny thing is, is if we do this 12 months ago, I think SmartZone wins.
John Deegan: Oh, absolutely. And so.
But RUCKUS One didn't exist, or we couldn't publicly speak about it 12 months ago. So that's,
Jim Palmer: From the points, from the rounds, from everything, RUCKUS One is the winner.
No offense to Trey and to Vincent Tu, Dave Burns and Rajev Iyer and, and Saurabh Mathur and the team. You guys win this one.
John Deegan: There you go.
And again, can't go wrong with any of them, but that was fun. Actually, it was, that was, that was more fun than I was expecting, actually. Cool.
I think they're kind of I was
Jim Palmer: Speaking of fun and winning.
John Deegan: Oh, there you go. I was gonna say, that was a nice segue. I was like, where's he going with this? Cause I'm wrapping it up. What do you got for us, Palmer?
Jim Palmer: The Wi-Fi Awards.
John Deegan: That's true.
Jim Palmer: They're being, they're announced. They are announced as of November 30th and voting started on the 1st of December and our podcast, our little humble conversations here, is actually a finalist for the podcast.
John Deegan: I'm just abusing that button today, I really am.
Jim Palmer: That's all good.
John Deegan: But it's for good reason.
Jim Palmer: And so we would appreciate if you feel like we have contributed to, you know, your, your education, your understanding, your anything. Please go vote for us. We'll have a link in the show notes and we'd appreciate your vote.
John Deegan: And there, there's actually one other RUCKUS related vote for that particular award, isn't there?
Jim Palmer: There is. The R 770 is a finalist for the Innovation of the Year award.
John Deegan: So. I'll give it a little cheer. Again. Yeah.
But you gotta mostly vote for our podcast.
Jim Palmer: Well, if you're there.
John Deegan: Yeah, exactly. You gotta vote for both of them.
Jim Palmer: Well, we do have an episode on the R770.
John Deegan: That's true. We'll link to that in the show notes too.
Jim Palmer: It's all tied together.
John Deegan: It is. It is. It's serendipitous. So on that note We good? All right. Well, congrats to the R1 team for, for giving us another really, really good product. R770 folks for getting nominated.
Congrats to you, Mr. Palmer for being on the podcast that gets to nominate. Thank you, sir. And on that note, ladies and gentlemen, our fine audience, we will catch you again on the next episode. Let me just find the outro. Have a good one.
Jim Palmer: Thanks!