I've seen "mesh" bandied around a lot in magazine articles but never defined, so I eventually assumed it meant a WiFi system where you could walk around and be transferred between APs. What does it really mean?
In a conventional system with access points, each access point has a wired connection back to the router. In a mesh, the access points are connected over wireless LAN, either through a completely separate wireless lan system embedded in the access point, or using up some of the bandwidth of the standard wireless LAN. Mesh is almost always slower because it has to use half the available bandwidth just to communicate between access points. Latency is also higher in mesh systems.
I got called by a Cisco rep in February, and knowing the price of 4x AC-PRO and a 3-year cloud controller license, asked him how much the equivalent Meraki solution would cost. He priced up 4x MR33 and 5yr(!) meraki licenses, which came to £2k+VAT. I've heard a lot of good things about Meraki, but not enough for that price premium. Do they do more reasonable stuff?
Yes, check out Willie Howe's YouTube channel for reviews. They're REALLY going after Unifi. And it's Cisco, so you know it will work. Sort of...
I know little about networking and even less about how WiFi works, so was reading through the Omada access point specs seeing they had higher db transmit power than Unifi and thinking.. that means they are more powerful so the cheaper models are the equivalent.
Well, there are two things I would ask you to consider about your statement. Firstly, the maximum combined amplification and antenna gain are limited by law, so there is no possibility of one access point being more powerful than another. They're all effectively the same. And secondly, the issue of coverage (not range, range is measured in a straight line, coverage is how much area the access point will reach) is dictated mainly by the client (your phone, tablet, laptop etc.) Imagine I'm standing in the middle of a football field with a megaphone. And there are people in the stands. They can probably all hear me, but I can only hear the ones nearest the pitch and the ones in the upper tiers are completely inaudible. Unless you can give your phone or tablet a megaphone, your phone will always be able to hear your access point but the access point can't hear the phone. That's why the transmit power on the AP-AC-LR is the same as every other Unifi access point but the RECEIVE/Listening antenna gain is higher - that's what makes it Long Range.
When every manufacturer gives different details in their specs, how do you find like for like? I haven't found antenna radiation patterns for the Omada APs, or if they're 2x2, 3x3 or 4x4 (something I see bandied around with Unifi and which are more powerful).
I would very politely ask you to not use 'powerful'. Perhaps 'better coverage'? The 2x2, 3x3, 4x4 just refers to how many send and receive channels (and antennae) they have. You can combine the channels to get more bandwidth (and therefore send data faster). The thing about Unifi isn't that the access points are exceptionally good. They're not. They're perfectly adequate and the real thinmg is that if you have a building with 5 access points and you want to add a new one, you just plug it in and adopt it. And that's it. It just works. No configuration, no messing about. It gets all it's data automagically from the controller and that's it done. For an IT professional's point of view it's the ultimate lazy-mans tool.
For consumers not buying quantity the price difference is more marked.
