What do you use for Wifi APs?

  • 24 February 2014
  • 9 replies
  • 1375 views

Userlevel 7
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  • Retired Webrooter
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I've been hearing lots of good stuff about Meraki and Ubiquiti lately - any of you on those systems?  What's everyone using for APs in their business and what do you think of it?

9 replies

Userlevel 2
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After testing meraki and looking over several others we decided _not_ to use it.
meraki is very good with lots of festures - but too expensive for us (initial and yearly costs).
Openmesh with the webbased Cloudtrax Dashboard is doing the same job for us.
One time cost in the APs $75 each - no yearly costs - dashboard is free. 
 
Seperating guest WLAN and internal WLAN is possible - we are using Printed Tickets for our guest.
 
Its the perfect solution for our (small) environment with 50 users and low amount of guests.
 
newmy
 
Userlevel 7
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Openmesh looks nice.  I haven't had a chance to play with their stuff.  I hear you on meraki being expensive though.
Userlevel 2
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Meraki is very nice with tons of features.
We wanted to have a guestnetwork and a throttling so one user on the WLAn is not able to eat all the networktraffic of our internetline.
We have 3 locations and needed 4 merakis each of about 400$ + 250$ yearly support and webdashboard.(thats about 2600$)
 
With openmesh we got 7*OM2P-HS an one OM2P wich takes us 600$ one time for the same purpose.
 
newmy
Userlevel 7
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Wow, that is a big difference.  Glad you found a cheaper option that works for you.
Userlevel 3
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Can you tell us more about OpenMesh? And your access points? I have one Meraki AP and I really like the cloud/dashboard.

Does OpenMesh do the same? I like that I can schedule when to turn off/on the SSID's and that there is Layer 3 and 7 firewall rules.

I am not a CLI guy...
Userlevel 5
I'm a big fan of Ubiquity personally, we replaced a ton of ciso aeronet APs with like 1/3 as many UAPs and are very happy with them. That being said we did have 2 UAP Outdoor 5s that died as a result fo a firmware update (stable branch), Unifi took care of us though and we got new APs. At the price they're pretty hard to beat. When my home network's AP dies it'll get replaced by a UAP.
Userlevel 2
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actual ... no sheduling - no firewallrules with openmesh. As i said basic functions.
Userlevel 5
yea the Meraki stuff has a ton more cool features, but it's a couple hundred $ more per AP than Unifi or Open mesh and requires a subscription iirc. for my company Meraki priced themselves out of consideration because we don't specifically need the cool fancy stuff it does that other options don't have.
Userlevel 7
Badge +56
@ wrote:
yea the Meraki stuff has a ton more cool features, but it's a couple hundred $ more per AP than Unifi or Open mesh and requires a subscription iirc. for my company Meraki priced themselves out of consideration because we don't specifically need the cool fancy stuff it does that other options don't have.
They also throw in some free MDM stuff which I know has become popular with a lot of IT folks.

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