I would personally always recommend Meraki over the above for ease of deployment and management. My only reservation is you feel like you never really own the equipment... its more like you're leasing it and that the end it all just stops working. Where with the above products, …
I believe UniFi has a great product line and has very similar management capabilities to Cisco Meraki MR. What UniFi does not provide, however, is technical support. That business is essentially outsourced to other businesses willing to do that. Depending on the deployment, …
Meraki is a great product providing many of the same remote management features that Ubiquiti offers for network solutions. The main difference is Meraki licensing costs. Each device must be licensed in order to work. After a licensing period expires the device will stop …
In a larger environment once you set up, I think it's really easy to manage. It's all I can say. So in any kind of a large environment, it's going to be super easy. Even in a small environment, you're doing minor clicks and configurations, so it's just going to be just as good there as it is in a large environment.
Ubiquiti is well suited to not just indoor WLAN access, but also outdoors. In fact, the range of the outdoor applications, while maintaining throughput is astonishing. I would say this is not a solution for a 1-5 person small office, due to the costs.
It's cloud based, so as long as we have an internet connection, we can access it. Whenever we push a change, it's one stop like a single pane of glass to manage all our equipment. And so that's what I liked about it.
Our current series doesn't have the GPS Telemetry for auto placement on maps that is coming out, I believe in future models, but we're not there yet. I believe they're trying to make them backwards compatible. So there is a lot of manual places on the map. Make sure you get it in the right location because that can determine its ability to locate your clients in the building.
And then I would say the other thing that they probably just need to work on a bit is a bit more of the RF management, the ability to see how is that AP broadcasting compared to others.
Management of devices has become much simpler with the UNMS application, but personally, I would like to see some AirMax-like devices from their Unifi line where everything could be managed from an Unifi controller.
Most Ubiquiti devices are 24V PoE, which is the bane of my existence. I have had several devices fried when staff plugged into standard 48V PoE. They generally don't fail catastrophically, either. You just get strange issues that are difficult to diagnose and eventually need to replace them.
Devices seem to have trouble with many patch cables/switches. Make sure you certify any patch cables you make and don't over crimp.
Sending devices from the factory with same 192.168.1.20 IP instead of DHCP makes it a pain to bulk-setup devices.
The Cisco Meraki WiFi Access Point dashboard and support license is mandatory so to continue usage we will need to renew the license. We may opt to purchase a more current WiFi generation device if something newer is available at that time. Currently, happy with the use of the dashboard as it is very feature rich.
To get basic functionality doesn't take long. Set up a new Meraki Dashboard activate the licenses and get internet connection for the APs and you are more or less done. The Dashboard will find your items and you're good to go.
Ubiquiti makes great Access points at various tiers provided far better coverage and throughput than consumer-grade wireless repeaters and routers. We have not had any performance complaints from guests or from the administration who use the wifi on a daily basis.
Meraki support is usually top notch. The are quick to respond and stick with an issue until it is resolved. One of the difficulties I've had with Meraki MRs is the limited ability the customer has in troubleshooting. Much of the more technical aspects of resolution can only be accessed by the Meraki support team, meaning dedicated IT teams are reliant on them when more complicated issues arise.
Ubiquiti's support is basically non-existent by design. However, their forums are a great resource if you are willing to do the research and ask questions. Keep in mind Ubiquiti sells hardware, not support so the responses will be from the community of professionals also using Ubiquiti just like you.
There were documents that detailed how the WiFi Access Point was to be installed and mounted. The only issue was to cable the device, we use a third party for this type of work and typically has to be performed after normal business hours. Other than that, the installation was easy.
We looked at HP and their products, their Aruba products. We actually entertain looking at some of Cisco's products. The problem is once you start down a path with a technology that you choose and you get pretty deep down that path, it's very hard to try to change, especially when something's working so well
We have used products from Netgear, ZyXEL, Cloudmesh, Datto, Mereki, and EnGenius previously often choosing products based on a specific situation, since starting with Ubiquiti [WLAN] we have pretty much stopped [usage] of all other vendors in the networking field and standardized which better allows us to stock spare equipment. Best part is if you need to replace equipment it is easy to swap it out quickly as the controller also acts as a live configuration backup.
It's really easy just to add an AP to a dashboard. It adopts the config we already have there for everything else. So there's not a lot to configure. I guess it's kind of a one-time setup unless you have some unique use cases to where you want things, maybe not broadcasting from that AP or not. So it's a simple product to use.
