Test Gear: Ruckus 7962
Keeping in mind that the hardware you’d be most likely to buy would be consumer versions of the enterprise gear we tested, we wanted to approach this as a comparison of technologies more than a review of any given product.
By now, you know a bit about the Ruckus ZoneFlex 7962 access point we evaluated, but let’s take a closer look. Unlike a consumer access point, which is typically built to look cool and enticing, the 7962 is the exact opposite. It’s designed to blend into the woodwork—or, to be more exact, to the ceiling, where it will blend into the white tiling and look a lot like a dome light so as to go unnoticed by would-be thieves and vandals.
Naturally, with 802.11n radios, Gigabit Ethernet, and other electronics running full tilt, the access point can get pretty warm. This is why Ruckus build a heatsink into the bottom.
Under the hood, you can see how radically different the Ruckus design is from conventional access points. Note the circular arrangement of directional antennas.
Once you get up into enterprise-class wireless equipment, deployments generally use a controller device to help manage traffic and coordinate multiple access points. We paired the 7962 with the mid-range Ruckus ZoneDirector 1000 controller running firmware 8.0.1.0 build 13.9
