Ruckus 7363 vs 7372 - Which one should I use?

First of all they look different. The 7372 has adopted the look of Ruckus's and the industry's leading access point the 7982. I have to say I much prefer the look of the 7372 as it is slimmer and would stand out less than the 7363 access point. Overall it looks like a much slicker exterior design.

Ruckus 7363

Ruckus 7372

Costs

The Ruckus 7372 access point comes in at £447 RRP and the Ruckus 7363 access point comes in at 413 RRP an access point. So what do you get for extra cash?

Managed

Well both can be standalone AP's or controlled via the Ruckus Zone Director wireless controller as expected. Both can mesh when controller via a controller and both offer 2.4Ghz coverage as well as 5Ghz coverage and use the standards 802.11 a/b/g/n.

Capacity

What about handling clients? The 7372 access point claims up to 500 simultaneous users. Bear in mind this is actually spread across each radio so effectively 250 users per radio. If you are using encryption over the air like WPA2 AES for example you cannot have over 100 users per radio due to the chipset on board which handles the encryption. In reality though you would never have that many users on an access point as that would average a very low throughput per user.

The 7363 access point handles up to 200 concurrent users so 100 users per radio and the same rules apply as above to this model.

Voice wise you can have up to 20 simultaneous users on the 7363 and 30 on the 7372.

Main differences

The main difference between the two is actually the one that will benefit people the most. The 7372 actually has a feature called PD-MRC this is unique to Ruckus and has massive benefits for networks that are using lots of mobiles devices. PD-MRC stands for polarization diversity maximal ratio combining. In a nut shell the access points will listen on its antennas and send the signal back on the antennas that provided the best signal. They will also listens to which way the signal was polarized and send the signal back horizontally or vertically depending on the orientation of the device.