We are a similar size and are at the tail end of the same project. We replaced Meraki with Ubiquiti.
Meraki served us well the past five years and I have no complaints. However, we had a need to massively expand our deployment to really do it right. We will almost triple the number of AP’s on campus when this is finished. We have had a very positive experience with Ubiquiti gear. The hardware has been great and everywhere I put them the wireless support calls have gone away. It does vlans and 802.1x auth. This is a positive and a negative – there are no sales account people to deal with. The positive side is we can just go online and order equipment. Throughout this project we ordered gear as needed. The negative side is that there are no account people to ask questions or be your advocate if you are having a problem. The controller has been a little unreliable. The AP’s will run fine when this happens but the guest auth page and the management page become unavailable. This would be less of a problem if the guest portal is hosted somewhere else like the firewall. We have worked with support on this and I am hoping their latest suggestions will solve it. Support- There is no number to call unless you buy their “Elite” services. Otherwise you can open a ticket online or post on the forums. The forums are very active and there is a big UBNT presence there helping out. Inventory- they seem to have some problems keeping gear in stock. No PPSK- a bunch of us from schools have requested this feature but it hasn’t shown up yet. Cloud controller-they have an offering but I don’t know much about it. Their controller is a Java app with a MongoDB. It’s relatively simple to spin up and move around. A lot of people host it on a VM on AWS or Azure, etc.. We host it on a VM locally. POE- not much of a problem but in the few places where we didn’t have enough POE we added Ubiquiti switches just for the AP’s. You do need to have a good grasp on WiFi fundamentals (channels, power levels, rssi levels, #clients per ap, etc…) to do this right. The automatic tuning is less then ideal. For us the positives outweighed the negatives and we would do it again. Our “customers” are getting really great wireless service now. From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv <[email protected]> On Behalf Of John Rodkey Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2018 2:10 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] Wireless Options Our college - about 40 buildings, 1200 students, 3500 wireless clients per day, currently 310 WAPs - is considering a major upgrade in WAPs, replacing a number that are 9 years old and no longer supported. We could replace with the latest model of our existing vendor, but want to consider all the feasible alternatives. We have a hard requirement that the controller be cloud-based, the system deal well with Mac clients, understand VLANs and an enterprise quality network, and have a rich set of configuration, logging, monitoring, and troubleshooting tools for dealing both with clients and access points. Responsive support is also required, and unsurprisingly total system cost is a significant issue. 3 vendors come to mind: Meraki, Ubiquiti, and Aerohive. Questions: 1) do other vendors come to mind that play well in this space? 2) what are your positive experiences with any of the above? 3) what are your negative experiences? 4) have you recently gone through this analysis, and if so, what were your conclusions? 5) what issues have you experienced with PoE capacity requirements with these devices? John Rodkey Director of Servers and Networks Westmont College ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss.
