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Hello everyone, looking at doing a refresh of our current setup. Currently we are using symbol AP6521’s, about 8 per location. These are discontinued and need to be replaced. Looking for something that’s cloud managed, VLAN aware & meshing. Mostly familiar with Meraki and unifi. Something with a nice interface is a bonus. So many options out there is easy to get overwhelmed. These are mainly used for RF guns and a bit of web browsing. Just looking for some feedback of what other people out there are using. Good customer support also.

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I think you answered your own question :wink:

Meraki and Unifi are probably the contenders here. I’d personally lean towards Meraki if you can make it fit budget. The hardware warranty and fact that “nobody got fired for buying Cisco” are worth the increased cost for a larger net that needs to be reliable like i’d expect for scanners.

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I like Ubiquity APs.

Meraki is a fat NO from me, unless they got rid of the subscription model?

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I recently deployed a bunch of Aruba InstantOn AP’s and really like them. -Zero- complaints from users.

I know most people are going to say Ubiquiti and while I have a bunch of them out there, I won’t be deploying any more. From the late 2020 firmware debacle that took them months to kind of admit to, but not really, to devices unable to connect for no apparent reason without restarting the units and similar quirks, I’ll pass. The Aruba’s are priced similarly and just work.

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Haha yeah Meraki is good although we had issues with their customer service at while back. Not really a fan of their license model either. We pay enough for licensing already for firewalls and M365. I’ve always had decent luck with the unifi’s but don’t really like installing software to manage them, especially when it uses Java. I haven’t tried their cloud controller though.

Been hearing lots of good things about Aruba. I was approached by Extreme Wireless but I’m less familiar with their product. Anyone have any experience with them? Price point is a big one since I’ll have to purchase around 32 AP’s.

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If price is a concern, and you know what you’re getting into with Unifi then that’s probably the solution for you, the self-hosted controller is a huge plus for me. The downside I see is that you’re burying cost in labor in your implementation and ongoing support time, and potentially sacrificing network availability - rather than “four nines” uptime you might get “three nines” as an arbitrary example, sometimes that matters.

I tinkered with Aruba pre-HP and I wasn’t impressed but that’s an ancient take. [Full disclosure I’m a EXTR shareholder] Extreme’s offering is attractive, but if you’re comfortable RYOing UniFi it’s probably just sunk cost - you’re already comfortable with the downsides of UniFi so why pay someone to make them go away?

If you’re dealing with a very large area ruckus might be worth a look (but you’re probably priced out) - I was never any more impressed with them than Cisco other than long range performance, but that’s also a few years out of date as well.

The system you’re comfortable supporting the probably the system for you, you have to support it after all :wink:

Best of Luck

-P

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Thanks everyone for the input. I’m not currently using Unifi at the sites I’m looking to refresh. We have a couple of small sites that use them because they were already there. I use to sell and deploy them at one of my previous jobs. That’s why I’m familiar with them.

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Aruba 315’s have been solid for us. Instant on stuff is pretty decent.

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Have deployed Unify APs at several sites without any issues. Would be my personal recommendation. But it’s all down to your budget and familiarity with the product. Sounds like you already have your main contenders in mind.

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“Good customer support also” This will rule out Unifi as the support is via community, also known for introducing more errors than they fix in updates.

Extreme/Aerohive are an excellent cloud managed Wifi solution, Aruba instant on also. Note that with cloud you are likely paying for something you may not need, these are excellent for ad-hoc deployment or unplanned (i.e. no surveys) etc and provide managed guest, various controls and filtering etc - but it sounds like you have a fairly simple need for internal network access SSID.

I suggest asking Extreme for a demo AP to test if they have been in touch, do the same for Aruba.

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I would say Meraki, Unifi or Aruba. I had Meraki at my last job they were nice I did like the interface and the functions I got. The only bad part about Meraki is the subscription. I have also used Unifi, the WAPs are nice and the best bang for your buck in my option. But I used both their wireless controller you install on a PC as well as their Unifi cloud dongle thingy. But are pretty bad. Some things I were doing in the controller I would have to revert back to the old GUI layout becuase the new GUI layout that was installed with the firmware update was buggy as hell, or features were missing. There were even warning banners stating the new GUI was known to have issues, I just did not realize how much stuff was broken. Aruba is another good one, I have not used them much but I do hear good things about them. We are going to be deploying them soon at my current job.

Also be aware depending on what WAP model you go with you might need to supply POE+ power to fully use the WAP. Most WAPs that need POE+ will still work with POE but their preformance and broadcast might be dialed down. When I did my Meraki rollout we also replaced all our switches with POE+

But depending on your firewall you might be able to use that as a wireless controller. I know Fortinet you can managed their WAP (FortiAPs) from their firewall, it is a signal pane of glass type setup.

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Cambium and Ligowave are about the same price and reliability of Ubiquiti, with much better support options (last I looked).

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We Run about 200 Aruba WAPS here. added clearpass recently, have about 3000 devices online per day (chromebooks), guest network see’s a additional 500(phones).

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We have deployed Unifi’s in multiple places. Really like the central management of them via the controller. We have had some weird issues where they would randomly stop relaying DHCP. But further firmware upgrades have seemed to fix that. They are not the best of the best, but they are hard to beat for the price-point and they generally do the job nicely. Oh, yeah, there is that weird thing where if they lose their wired uplink they will “help” you by finding a wireless uplink but then failing to let it go when the wired uplink comes back online, thus creating a loop which causes all kinds of network havoc. Make sure to turn that setting off…We’ve seen that come up at three different client sites and because of our own experience with it have been able to help them quickly diagnose and resolve the issue. Other than those two issues, the Unifi’s have done the job nicely for us.

EDIT: One more issue…Unifi’s will not pass tagged vlan 1 traffic…at all…if that is necessary in your environment, you will want to be aware of that before you begin to deploy. Some developer at Unifi apparently decided that no one would ever want to do that…

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you can’t tag traffic to VLAN 1. VLAN 1 is reserved as the default VLAN

Unifi works with VLAN 1 just fine its the default network that is created out of the box for each site

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Well, I’m not saying its good network design, nor did we design those networks, but… https://community.ui.com/questions/Why-cant-I-tag-on-VLAN-1/2954c9d7-996a-444b-ac11-9580402319df

If you don’t need to tag VLAN 1 then, yes, the Unifi’s work with it just fine. More than one environment we work with assigns a different VLAN than 1 as the management VLAN.

However, note in that link I included in this post above the post that reads…

"This is a simplistic and patronizing answer. The default VLAN is 1, but it can and is easily changed from 1 to another value in many, many corporate environments I’ve seen. It’s possible to make the native vlan on a trunk just about any other VLAN, leaving 1 for possible use in other numbering conventions.

I just happen to have hit one now, where the convention is:

- To split various offices and AWS cloud accounts into 10.x.0.0/16 networks

- To split the 10.x.0.0/16 into 4 /18s for Production, Staging, QA and Development

- To split the /18s into 4 /20s in AWS to handle Multi-AZ HA deployments, or separate HA clusters in OpenStack in private cloud

- To split the /20s into 16 /24s, of the form 10.x.y.0/24 for various tiers and applications

- To have the vlan match y, as they don’t propagate across locations

- To use the last subnet/Vlan of 15 for management

- Meaning 10.0.1.0 is meant for a DMZ network, and uses vlan 1

- Structure and mnemonics…

And I have a need to expose that DMZ network as it’s used for Guests, in a Unify AP, and because there’s this stupid and unnecessary restriction on using Vlan 1 tagged, I can’t do that. I’m coming from mostly Cisco equipment including their APs, where there is no such silly restriction, and was sort of surprised to see this here."

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You are absolutely right about the new GUI. It is absolutely horrible and non-intuitive and I have had to do the same, revert to the old GUI to find the settings I needed to adjust…stick with the older one.

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I was using Ubiquiti but grew tired of constant connectivity issues. I just updated my WAPs to ZyXel NWA1123-AC PRO and they have been rock solid. I use ZyXel’s Nebula cloud management platform, which works pretty well (I do hope they update the very outdated user interface).