1

Hello Spicers,

We plan to deploy a decent WiFi infrastructure in our company and I’m looking for advices, tips, etc.
We have 5 buildings that communicate with each other and each building is around 300m² (square meter).

I’m looking essentially for these specs:

  • WPA2-Enterprise (RADIUS)
  • Multiple VLAN (and so SSID) support
  • Centralized Management
  • 802.11ac Wave2 and MU-MIMO (our laptops support MU-MIMO) and a good throughput of course
  • Ease of management
  • Affordable price (as everybody I guess)

For the moment, for what I’ve seen so far. I’m pretty hyped by Ubiquiti and their UAP-AC-HD models and a CloudKey for the management.

What do you think about it? What about the other brands?
Which advice would you give in general? I’m a beginner in this domain…

Regards,

DeltaSM

7 Spice ups
2

If you can live with the 4 SSID limit of Ubiquiti, don’t need phone support, and don’t need detailed application traffic reporting that you get from Meraki, then Ubiquiti is fantastic.

Ruckus is good if you need strong APs and support, but don’t need the traffic visibility that you get with Meraki.

Any other solution is generally going to be at least 4x the price of Ubiquiti. I use Ubiquiti at nearly 20 sites, and it has been fantastic. I also use Ruckus at my main building. It works great also, but we did have downtime when the hard drive in the controller died.

3

Would have to say you get what you pay for, Ubiquiti cheap and will do some of the job but Meraki, Cisco or even Sophos access points are in a different league.

Just in the process of removing Ubiquiti from the current company im in because the range they get is poor compared to others, make sure what ever you put in you get a wireless heat-map report down of you site, there are companies out there that can do it for you but you can also get the software your self.

its really worth doing many years ago an IT manager i worked with put a load of stand alone D-link ap’s in to a warehouse, we had a terrible time with the devices the pickers used loosing signal, had heat map done and found because of the materials in the warehouse the d-links just couldnt maintain the connection of handle the movement.

Replaced the lot with some Sophos Ap’s managed by there UTM and it was amazing how much performance we could get with half the access points, to put it into context we had 55 D-link Ap’s and replaced them with 22 Sophos Ap’s .

Another good option is Meraki allow you to try before you buy get a couple of Ap’s and play with the range on them before you commit

4

Since you are new to this space, the first thing I will recommend is to have a vendor agnostic wireless site survey done to determine the number of AP’s and locations.

Armed with that info, o would recommend:

Meraki (we use the MR33 in our environment)
Aruba
Ruckus Wireless (Used these and would have stayed with them if we hadn’t switched out network infrastructure to Meraki)

There are others but for Enterprise, these are the ones I have used and have found to be “Enterprise ready”.

5

Another Ubiquiti. The SSID count in Unifi is now at 8 for the Unifi NanoHD ( https://unifi-nanohd.ui.com/ ). If you do need phone support, it comes at a cost. The other option for Unifi is to purchase from someone like Streakwaave to have them provide the support. If you want something else., you could consider D-Link as they now have the cloud-managed system ( Nuclias - network management solutions by D-Link | D-Link ). Stand-alone really have a hard time with handoffs so that was probably the issue there. If you have a slightly bigger budget, Aruba is a good option as well.

@Aruba @D-Link @Ubiquiti_Inc

1 Spice up
6

Wow thanks for the answers guys ! I wasn’t expected that much in a short time !

@kevinhsieh ​: for what I’ve seen, Ubiquiti supports up to 8 SSIDs (BSSID but I suppose it’s the same?) which is perfect (5 is great in our case). To be honest I’ve never heard of Ruckus and Meraki,so I will have a look ! Thank for this ! What do you think about Ubiquiti’s controller? Do you have a cloud key?

@markstorey ​ and @pbrain : I understand the importance of a heat map/site survey and will have a look for this. I will also check for Sopho’s APs solutions because we have one UTM.

@michael9595 ​: thank for the references ! I will have a look for Aruba (but it seemed more expensive than Ubiquiti for what I’ve seen).

Any comments about TP Link Enterprise products?

Thank you all :slight_smile:

7

I have never used any TP-Link but would consider them along the same tier as the D-Link line.

8

Thanks for the shout-out, @michael9595 ​!

OP - If you’d like to connect with our team about what was suggested above, feel free to reach out. Happy to help out more if I can.

9

I’m going to recommend Meraki. The cloud dashboard / central management makes rolling these out a breeze, definitely enterprise grade. We’ve got about 50 and are in the process of rolling out some newer models (MR42/MR45). Licensing is quite high for these, but you get what you pay for: rock solid performance and easy management