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Hello everyone, I currently need to purchase some replacement APs for our company. I’ve been recommended the Cisco Meraki line. I like the controller-free, cloud based system but not sure if the licensing prices will be worth the convenience. Also heard Aerohive and Aruba make some really good wireless options for business.

What do you recommend?

(PS: We are in a medium sized office building of about 75 users.)

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How many devices do you envision concurrently being connected to the WIfi? Do you need a guest portal? What about Ubiquity and or OpenMesh?

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We have 12 in our current setup, but 6 are dead/running out of life so just really want to replace those 6 for the time being. There is currently a guest portal and we do need it. And I haven’t looked at either of those brands yet, open to any recommendations! We currently have an older Cisco model.

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Ubiquiti or OpenMesh.

We have over a dozen Ubiquiti AP’s and they are fantastic and really easy to setup.

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Unifi all the things :-), guest portal etc

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Can you give us some sort of floor plan of your office space? 12 access points seems like overkill unless the office is really spread out.

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Another vote for UniFi. While you will want a controller (Cloud Key or software), it’s still a very solid solution. BTW, I like Meraki a lot, use them in one of my setups, but the prices are just too high (as you alluded to).

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Ruckus WAP’s

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It’s a rectangular building of about 38k square footage. That was an older setup, I imagine the range on newer models would cover a lot more area with less APs.

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Another vote for Ruckus APs. I have 3 covering 13k square rectangle single story building. I went with Ruckus unleashed APs with cloud manager. More $'s than UniFi, but I’ve used Ruckus at a few locations and never had any issues.

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Ubiquiti vote here.
They’re all I use anymore.
They’re on the cheap end, and tied for top in quality and reliability, so unless a special case or feature need dictates otherwise (rare), go with Ubiquiti UniFi APs

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Just keep in mind that Ubiquiti doesn’t do SNMP very well, so any monitoring you will have to do on your controller or on the switch you connect your AP’s to.

Also, make sure (really sure!) that your PoE switch can handle the Unifi AP’s. We had to switch to injectors because our 4 Cisco SG200-26FP’s couldn’t handle feeding 5 AP’s (lots of errors in the PoE port logs). Apparently (some of) their AP’s tend to go out of spec with regard to the power draw, and apparently the Unifi switches are engineered to deal with that (it’s either that or all 4 of our Cisco FP switches or our 5 AP’s are broken or out of spec).
Either way, just go with injectors to save you from having to troubleshoot randomly rebooting AP’s and general flaky behaviour of your WLAN.
Not sure if the same applies to other brands.

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If you don’t have the budget for the Meraki licenses you could go with the new Cisco 1800 series of AP’s. They all have a built in virtual controller (Mobility express) free of charge. Mobility express can support up to 100 AP’s which is nice I you ever need to expand your network. The 1800 series has several models from 2x2 up to a 4x4 and they will even manage the older Cisco Aironet AP’s if you are looking to modernize your network.

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AJ- sounds like Cambium Networks products would be right up your alley here. Since you’re looking for cloud based management, I’d recommend you look into our cnPilot Indoor solution, which is a suite of affordable, enterprise-grade, high density 802.11ac Indoor Access Points, that comes standard with cnMaestro Cloud Management, including: End-to-end network lifecycle management for inventory management, device onboarding, daily operations and maintenance and more.

Linking to some more details here: cnPilot Enterprise Indoor 802.11ac Wave 2 Wireless Access Point

Let me know if you have any questions!

@trevor-cambium-networks

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I have OpenMesh and like them a lot.

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@Dennis (on mobile so I can’t tag or quote)
That is my one complaint about UniFi APs. The base model and long range models take a funky type of PoE. They need a special switch or their injectors. If you get the pro model, normal PoE works great.

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+1 for OpenMesh. Very easy to setup and manage.

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I would recommend Aerohive cloud controllers with the AP230, they are great and cost effective. Also it is very easy to add on as you grow. We started off with a 48 port switch (SR2148P) and (20) AP 230 at one of our campus. Now we have four sites and over 130 AP’s also we have the BR200-LTE-VZ AP that uses a Verizon 4 G card to allow us to light up a small remote site when needed.

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I would err on the side of caution and not count on it - not to mention 802.11ac only works on 5GHz.

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I would recommend AP-130, good price and quality. Check the specs to make sure its meets your need.