 When I installed a Ruckus R700 wireless access point in my house to replace my premium consumer wireless router, my wife's immediate reaction was that she thought I had actually swapped out her phone for one that looked the same but was faster. So as much fun as it is for us hardware enthusiasts to blow the rant on a new graphics card, a bunch of RAM, or a fancy case, I concluded at that time that we could probably actually get more value for our money by considering wireless upgrades instead of some of that other stuff. It's just too bad that the unit I showed off last time costs a thousand dollars, making it attainable only to folks who are out shopping for water blocks for their Titan X graphics cards, but today that changes. This is the Exclaim XI3, your next wireless access point. Kingston's KC310 business class SSDs deliver massive capacities, firmware-based power loss protection, and enough performance that we're powering our brand new storage server with them. Click right here to learn more. So when you open the box for an XI3, the first thing you'll see is a gigantic QR code. Yes, this business-grade wireless solution wants you to set it up with a mobile phone. What? Oh, and I guess there are also some accessories in there, but I, you know, it took me a while to figure that out because I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. So you get a power over ethernet injector, a $15 value, some mounting hardware, a little key for removing the unit from the aforementioned mounting hardware, and an ethernet cable, and then in most cases, I guess probably also the XI3 indoor access point itself. And let's talk about this sucker for a minute, shall we? The hardware actually looks pretty familiar, but I guess it's not exactly a top secret that Exclaim is a daughter company of Ruckus, the makers of the super awesome enterprise-grade wireless gear that you're most likely to find at an airport or university versus at the local Starbucks. So let's see which one of Ruckus' models got cut down a little to make it more price appropriate and user-friendly for Wanda of Wanda's diner to deploy in her restaurant. Raw specs-wise, the XI3 looks pretty darn similar to the Ruckus R500. It's got the same 2x2 antenna config with the same power output. It can handle the same N300 megabit speeds on 2.4 GHz and AC867 on 5 GHz, and even the power draw is rated exactly the same. I mean, sure, the 500 client advertised capacity has been toned down to 100, and along with the other feature trimming, very notably the removal of BeamFlex Plus, Ruckus' proprietary tech for punching through interference and barriers more easily, there is no compatibility with Ruckus' zone director controllers for local or remote management of scores of access points across a large deployment, although apparently a cloud option is coming soon. No. Xclaim figures any more than 10 APs, and you're probably overdoing it, and you should move up to Ruckus. So back to managing them, then. How are you supposed to do it? Right. The app. It starts with that QR code from before that basically brings up a how-to guide. Then you install the Harmony for Xclaim app, password protect the app, which, by the way, touch ID support on iOS is a very nice touch. Then you go through a very basic AP setup that pretty much amounts to creating an SSID or a name for your network and a passphrase. Then you scan for access points on the network, and that was the first stumbling block for me, and one that I think Xclaim could handle a bit better. Both of my units upgraded their own firmware once connected to the network with Internet access, but they didn't reboot on their own, and I had to read a little error message in the app to discover that I needed to go manually hard reset the devices to apply the firmware upgrade. That should happen on its own. With that out of the way, though, I got the AP configuration page fired up, and there's basically nothing in there. You can assign one or both of your radios to the SSIDs you create, although I would recommend manually breaking out 2.4 and 5 GHz if you intend to use this at home. So you can manually reserve the faster 5 GHz band for devices that matter and leave 2.4 GHz to non-performance sensitive ones instead of relying on the AP's band steering to decide for you and muck up your game stream performance potentially. You can choose a particular channel and channel width for each radio, or leave it on auto to let Ruckus' channel fly technology hop around according to whichever has the least congestion. A feature whose functionality I was surprised to discover when I cracked open my YSPY and saw it flopping around like a Mexican jumping bean in our crowded 2.4 GHz environment, and one that I'm not 100% sure how I feel about since not being on 1, 6, or 11 is not really a recommended configuration when you ask most wireless experts. There are a few other little things you can tune in there on a per SSID basis. You can set bandwidth limits, and you can control whether or not clients can see the rest of the wired devices on the network. But that's pretty much it. I covered the whole thing. Wireless for dummies. Which doesn't mean that it sucks. It lacks a central controller. So with multiple AP's, clients are left to decide which one to connect to. But the XI3 delivers great wall and floor penetration power even on 5 GHz. New settings from the app are applied nearly immediately. Clients connect almost instantly compared to that horrendous lag that's typical of consumer grade gear. And range was absolutely freaking awesome. I don't really know what to say. Other than this is really good stuff, and you're getting it for less than a third of the price, if you're willing to give up some of those ruckus features that, if we're being honest with ourselves, we'd never be dinking around within the first place if the bloody Wi-Fi just worked. But it's not perfect either. I think ruckus is getting pulled in a couple different directions right now. They've got a great idea here. Making deploying a great, reliable Wi-Fi solution so easy that any small business or home user can do it. But their users, Wi-Fi tech heads who manage deployments for their customers, are inherently hardcore and asking for things that Wanda of Wanda's Diner will never understand. So ruckus needs to decide once and for all what Xclaim is. Personally, I'm glad that they caved and added a web-based management tool, even if I only poked around in it after I'd set everything up through the app. But Wanda actually needs things simplified even further, even if that means hiding terms like 20 MHz or client isolation behind friendly sliders that say, I'm in a busy area with lots of other Wi-Fi or I'm in an isolated area and want more performance. And it needs like a one-touch guest network setup, for example, that does everything for Wanda. And while we're at it, the navigation of the app does need some polish too, like the grayed out actions button in the iOS app that's actually clickable to access some pretty critical settings or the unclear difference between the wireless symbol and the cog from the dashboard, which is called statistics instead of, I don't know, dashboard for some reason. And while we're at it, why does the statistics page contain information about how many packets have been sent instead of pretty graphs of use over time or alert heavy user leeching bandwidth off the network or something like that? I mean, Wanda doesn't care about packets unless they're ketchup. But of course, I don't think any of this stuff is a deal breaker, not even the odd crash of the app because I did have it happen. If I did think that, I wouldn't have told you this is your next access point. Now, to be clear, it's not for everyone. For a single or even a couple of wireless clients, a similarly priced consumer device will deliver higher speeds. But the fastest individual link speed is not the be-all and end-all of Wi-Fi performance, especially as you start to load up more clients. And I'll take Ruckus's PoE deployment, making better positioning much more possible since you're not reliant on a power jack nearby and Ruckus's ability to not have the hardware fold like a cheap suit once a couple of video streams start flying around over a fancy looking enclosure and big strong looking external antennas. Speaking of which, Crunchyroll is the site created by anime fans for anime fans. They offer the most current episodes of new shows straight from Japan like Kuroko's Basketball 3 and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and large collections of the most popular anime series like Naruto and One Piece. And all the content on their site is professionally subtitled. So, head over to crunchyroll.com slash Linus and you can get a 30... Okay, whatever 30 is. 30-day free trial of Crunchyroll Premium with our link giving you that whole month of free anime completely ad-free. 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