Last summer, we took a long look at the beamforming technology Ruckus Wireless employs in its Wi-Fi products. Ever since, we’ve been curious to see how the consumer version of this technology would play out in a competitive arena. After all, the skeptic in the backs of our heads kept wondering, “If Ruckus beamforming is consistently as amazing as we saw first-hand, why hasn’t it swept the planet and blown every other vendor off the map?” Perhaps this would be our chance to find an answer.
The 7811 ($154.81 at www.geminicomputersinc.com) is the only item in this roundup that is not a router. It’s an access point. So a lot of our discussion about QoS and storage features and all the rest simply doesn’t apply here. The only reason we’re including it is to investigate a possible higher-performance alternative to the usual 802.11n router choices.
To be fair, though, we have to give a caveat and qualify what Ruckus thinks of as quality. To reuse Ruckus’s phrase, the company is a lot more interested in raising the performance floor than raising the ceiling. Ruckus wants to enable high-def, wireless streaming video, a notoriously difficult application from a quality of service standpoint. Achieving the 20 to 40 Mb/s necessary for a HD stream isn’t hard, even in the 2.4 GHz band, but keeping it there is. Achieving fast, sustained wireless throughput is like trying to calculate your taxes in a room full of hungry toddlers.
Beamforming should help to block out all of that background chaos and provide concentrated, elevated throughput, plus it should allow for longer signal reception through obstacles. Ruckus opted to make the product 5.0 GHz-only to help minimize interference even further. In general, we know that 5.0 GHz tends not to have the distance reach of 2.4 GHz, but beamforming helps overcome this to the degree that Ruckus states the 7811 should be able to provide coverage throughout a 4,000-square foot home.
Note that we used Ruckus’s 7111 client bridge. This isn’t your usual USB dongle. The 7111 looks very similar to the taco-shaped 7811 AP, complete with AC adapter and 10/100 Ethernet port. The bridge’s form factor may not be convenient in some settings, especially on a notebook, but remember that it was designed for home theater deployment. At the same time, being restricted to 5.0 GHz may exclude compatibility with some of your existing clients. Proceed accordingly.
- Router Reignition
- Asus RT-N13U And RT-N16
- Belkin N150 And N1 Vision
- D-Link DIR-685
- Linksys WRT610N
- Netgear WRN2000v2 And WNDR3700
- Ruckus Wireless 7811
- TP-Link WR741ND
- TRENDnet TEW-654TR And TEW-671BR
- ZyXEL X550N
- How We Tested
- Benchmark Results: 1GB Transfer, Many Files
- Benchmark Results: 1GB Transfer, Single File
- Benchmark Results: IxChariot Throughput
- Benchmark Results: IxChariot Response Time
- Benchmark Results: Zap TCP
- Benchmark Results: Zap UDP
- Benchmark Results: PerformanceTest TCP
- Benchmark Results: PerformanceTest UDP
- Conclusion


Good point.
Which firmware was installed on it?
I have one (V1), but am very unhappy about the signal range! I have it replaced with a WNDR3700 and have now a twice as strong signal as before!
Bit the bullet with the $$ and opted for the Linksys and am very pleased.
pato, my WRT600N was the v1 variant. I forget the release version of the firmware, but it was the latest version, as Linksys has not released any updates for it in roughly a year (I've had the router since a few months after it was first released). I liked it due to the dual radios, however, but it would drop wireless clients randomly (which was aggravating and required me to reset the router about once every other month) and it would not retain my port forwarding settings for my home server. And I agree with you, signal range was marginal with that router.
2) Should have tested N + G concurrency on 2.4GHz as well as N only on 2.4 + 5GHz concurrency (for devices that had dual radio). This data is important for most people who will run a Wireless N device or two, but likely also have a few smart phones or a game console that only supports 2.4GHz... I know the Airport Extreme currently has a bug making this dog slow, do some of the others?
3) onyl 2 concurrent devices? how about 5 or 6? I regularly have 7 or 8. I notice performance drops off consistently just based on the number of connected devices, even if only one is "in use" actively downloading, and want to know if some routers hold out better with that.
4) no feature comparison chart?
How much did you guys test the shareport function? (Not much from what it looks like). The shareport function hooked up to an external hard drive only works if you are transferring a file or two using windows. It totally fails when you try to us it with a 3rd party backup program (such as acrea). I personally haven't tried connecting a printer to shareport. I also couldn't get it to work using eraser (a disk erasing utility. I concluded that it just doesn't work with third party apps. So far, none of the driver, firmware or shareport software updates have fixed this problem.
D-link does have a nice forum on their site where people can post their problems. For fixable problems, other users will helpfully solve your problems. For unsolvable problems (shareport being one of them) the user complaints just keep piling up. Rarely do d-link's own tech support grace the forums. Apparently, D-link is currently collecting all of the shareport grips and cataloging them. Ostensibly, this will result in a fix at some point in the future. Still waiting.