Wireless Refresh - College

locrieth

locrieth

locrieth

Associate
Joined
22 Jan 2005
Posts
405
Location
Moon
Hi,

So I work at a college and we are in the process of replacing our aged Cisco Wireless network. We have gone out to tender and received 3 bids back. The options are Meru, Meraki and Samsung (?!?!?). We are initially deploying about 60 APs to 2 new builds and then over the next year we will be deploying about another 250-ish APs across the older buildings to replace what we have now. We have around 850 members of staff and around 15,000 student. So my questions are which vendor would you go for? I'd never heard of Samsung doing Enterprise wireless solutions before last week, does anybody have or know of anyone who has one deployed and could offer an opinion on it? I've also read that Meru has just been bought out by Fortinet, so I don't know whether buying into them is a good idea or not, depending on what they are going to do with the currently available product line. Merakis offering is a cloud based controller, Which I am assuming will be ongoing annual cost for the life of the product?

Cheers in advance
 
We use Meraki and have had a good experience with the wifi side of the business. Due to the nature of our business the cloud management and ability to provision new SSID's from anywhere is invaluable. The hardware is decent enough and we only have issues when there are lots of people in an area (we're talking a few thousands and upwards)......at the end of the day they aren't high density AP's :)

Meraki support aren't too bad either but do seem to want to dig into the technical side of things sometimes rather than providing me with a fix or quick solution. I guess the main kicker you need to justify is the annual subscription and the fact you're AP's become door stops if the license expires without being renewed.
 
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In that environment, Meru all day. I would be inclined to let them look at your existing site survey and see if it is appropriate for the way their APs work, it wouldn't surprise me if you need fewer APs.

Meraki are decent but if you want any of the cool stuff you're right back at having to use an onsite wireless controller. There's nothing wrong with that but it basically becomes a 'normal' wireless product with a fancy web interface.

Given your specification of 2 sites and a relatively high number of devices Meru would be the stronger choice based on their current product portfolio. Off the top of my head costs for Meru vs. Meraki tend to break even after three years, Meru being 10 - 15% cheaper after five. Neither are cheap.

I've never seen / heard of anyone deploying a Samsung wireless system. I don't think there is a good reason to either with all the strong competitors in the wireless market (Ruckus, Aruba, Aerohive etc).
 
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Meru are now owned by forinet. Not that is should change much.

But my recommendation would be Ruckus, as we use it and its brilliant. Installed it and had it running for 4 years. No failures and don't really have to touch it.
 
Just watched a webinar for Meraki so I can get a free AP with 3 year cloud licence, looked pretty good. Need to see if I can find some Samsung Deployments for a bit of feedback to tell my boss. Thanks for your responses so far, keep them coming ;)
 
+1 for ruckus. The only times I needed to change anything is to enable smnp for spiceworks scanning and when setting up guest WiFi access both being really easy to do.

For the record I work in schools and a single ap can be hit with traffic from 30 devices at once and it just works.
 
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We use Ruckus in all variety of hotel and hospitality venues. I've not used them in an education venue but the Ruckus website is full of education campus case studies and examples.
You can have an onsite Zone Director (WLC)to manage them or have a cloud based solution. They also work in standalone mode but that's obviously not ideal foe a large site.
Can't recommend them enough!
 
We use an on-site Zone Director Ruckus setup here with ~12 APs (smallish building, lollondon) and while I don't particularly like it (purely subjective), it is very, very reliable for us as well. It works well with an initial bit of tweaking; not quite Meraki simple but definitely better in high density environments. I know a couple of very large event venues use Ruckus as well for their wireless.

I've seen Aruba and Aerohive deployed in a few schools providing classroom wireless to ~30 laptops at once at reasonable speeds.

I think you'd be hard pressed to pick a bad product. The 'best' one depends on what is most important to your company.
 
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