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Hello,

We currently have 2 sites that have a few Meraki APs at each (MR18s). I LOVE Meraki except for the licensing costs. It doesn’t necessarily bother me, but with moving to a new building I think it’s worth opening up to something else if there’s a better option.

Our new building is approximately 65,000 square feet and unlike the other 2 sites, wireless access will be a necessity on the manufacturing floor as part of some other systems we’re implementing after the move. We’ll also need it for the offices of course.

I intend on having a legitimate site survey done to advise on placement of the APs, but am wondering what your recommendations would be for places to start? I’m the lone IT Manager who spends time between 3 companies (hence 3 sites) so I rely on automation and simple management all the time. The single pane Meraki management is worth a lot to me so it would take something really good to get me away from that. I don’t have a budget but am authorized to purchase whatever I think is necessary.

Thanks in advance!

David

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Thats a fair amount of space, what other requirements do you have?

Just providing wifi on a network is pretty open ended!

There are a lot of options from Ubiqiti at the low end to Ruckus, Aruba, Cisco further up the chain. If you don’t want licensing issues don’t use Ruckus;-)

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Well, you haven’t given us any info to give you recommendations. Besides a “spend what you need to” budget, do you have any requirements? Do you need 11n, ac? You planning on using 5Ghz, 2.4Ghz, or both? What kind of clients are we looking at and how many? What exactly is this going to be used for as in what kind of and how much data? etc.

Most any enterprise solution will give you a controller for that single-pane, centralized management.

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Really the requirements aren’t much. Offices need wifi (public and private, VLAN’d off) for basic Outlook/file server access/printing (all clients are hardwired unless in the conference rooms) and the warehouse uses iPod Touch based scanners which interfaces with our ERP system. None of that is particularly strenuous or out of the range of any normal APs. I’m looking at this more from a management interface standpoint than anything.

There’s about 10 scanners on the floor and probably another 10 PCs that might be using it. Again, not much load on the system at all but it’s more important that it’s easier to manage.

AC is not a requirement at all, not that I wouldn’t be open to it but from a business standpoint we don’t need it.

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Sound slike Unifi to me then…if you are anti-licensing and just need a simple network but with great coverage then its really excellent and very reasonably priced

They sell all sorts of other wireless goodness like Gigabit over point to point kit, outdoor antennas and is always simplicity to setup and manage

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I’ve used Ubiquiti gear in the past and found the hardware very good but the options for management seemed really simple and basic (not in a good way). Has this changed with later revisions of the software controller?

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This was going to be my next question, what do you want out of the management interface then? Unifi is still pretty basic but slowly adding things here and there, Meraki has it all. Do you need that layer 7 visibility and all the bells and whistles? Do you need support? There are other solutions in between the two, but Meraki and Unifi are the only ones I have personally used.

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Do I need the really granular control? Probably don’t NEED it, but would rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

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We are using a Cisco 2504 controller with 1720i and older 1142N access points. I really like the setup. There is a little bit of a learning curve, but once there it very trouble free. The controller is about $800 with 5 license and the AP cost about $500 each. Each additional license is about $100 if memory serves me correctly.

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If you want all the bells and whistles, just be prepared to shill out much extra dough, since the subscription, licensing and sheer cost of hardware itself will push a simple deployment into 10ns of thousands of dollars. - Just saying.

Chose wisely to the needs, not wants. My motto, never overspend if not necessary.

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+1

No ongoing licencing costs, rock solid software and hardware and a feature-set that will leave all the others in the dust. I use these all the time and they are trouble free.

As for the AC or not AC question… it’s here. It’s the next step. It should be the standard offering from here on in. As long as the chosen vendor has suitable hardware/software and doesn’t expect the customers to be the beta testers then go for it. I have installed 20+ AC AP’s on Cisco controllers and they are just as trouble free and brilliant as I expected. And yes I have tested 20, 40 and 80Mhz channels using the only AC device I have right now (an HTC One M9) and got some pretty good speeds. Best was 88Mb/s on the 80Mhz channel. The HTC (as with most phones, phablets and tablets) has but a single wifi antenna. If we extrapolate the speed I have seen to 4 antennas that gives us 352Mb/s with the 802.11AC standard saying 433Mb/s is the attainable speed. Either way, that’s good speed for wifi.

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Is this design for density of client devices or for coverage of the client’s area? This can drastically change the total cost of this project. Also, how mission critical is wireless in this deployment? Another thing to keep in mind is that in order to get those VHT data rates on an 80MHz wide channel, the client device needs to be fairly close to the AP and the 4x20MHz channel band needs to be clear of interference. For this reason, in most high density environments you only see 20MHz and 40MHz channels in the 5GHz range. This is a good primer on channel widths vs. distance from client and RSSI values. In general, the wider the channel is, the closer you will have to be in order to achieve the highest data rates.

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Go for Unifi or with something like Luxul, problem with Luxul is if you have a MGMT VLAN other than 1 you are up a creek. You can’t change the mgmt VLAN and if you change the main VLAN to another one the AP is a brick till you hard reset it. However those APs are clean x-mit power, broadcom based and fairly reliable. Decently priced, however you’d have to get them from an a/v intergrator, as they aren’t sold on normal channels.

Other “high powered” soluitions are hype. You can’t legally sell an AP past FCC limits.

If not then ebayying it up for some Ciscos with a controller would work ok.

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