3com or Cisco

[scotty]

I'm looking at covering our whole site with wireless, the two main providers I'm interested in are 3com and Cisco. I have already had the survey carried out which came to the conclusion that we would require 32 AP's. After receiving quotes from both 3com and Cisco the difference in price is approx 5k obviously the Cisco solution been the most expensive. I was wondering if anybody else has experience of both solutions out there and may be able to justify that it's worth spending the extra 5k for Cisco or if anyone can reasssure me that although the 3com solution is cheaper it is still of a good standard

Cheers

[ChrisH]

I have no experience of but..... I have always heard good stuff about the Cisco stuff and dont tend to hear anything about 3 Com wireless gear.

[john]

I have no idea about the Cisco, but have a few 3 Com APs and they are nice APs, very stable, and seem to have an excellent range compaired to Buffalos

[plexer]

AP's aside what is going to be your security setup?

Ben

[CyberNerd]

If we could afford Cisco we'd use them. We can't. We use 3com.

[CyberNerd]

p.s the 3com is fine.

[Snuffkins]

3 Com is fine unless your planning on doing electronic reg. Otherwise i'd say go for 3com, there shouldn't be any performance difference.

If you are doing electronic reg though let me know cause we were one of the pilot schools and it's been so bad for us we've stopped using it... lol...

[ZeroHour]

scotty, firstly good luck with wireless, we had a hellish time
General rule for ya, the more secure you go the worse EVERYTHING is.
3com kit was what we had. It was a Office Connect hub which was okay but it had a issue with freezing every couple of weeks or so.
Not sure about cisco stuff.

[CyberNerd]

3 Com is fine unless your planning on doing electronic reg

what does electronic registration have to do with it ?
ethernet is TCP/IP, provided that works, so should everything else.
We can do registrations ok with 3com. The main thing is that the network is consistent.

I rather have the cisco cos I'm CCNA trained and their corporate propaganda rubbed off on me, but thats besides the point, 3com works well for us and is a lot cheaper.

[webman]

Get a few wireless companies in, let them know what you want out of the system. Get a few recommendations and go from there.

Then get them to price-match

[Snuffkins]

what does electronic registration have to do with it ?
.

I missed out the use of handhelds. We were using palms an ipaqs for the electronic registration, but it was so unreliable using 3com equipment. After testing it with Cisco, Netgear and some company called colubris networks and it working with no problems, my assumption that the 3com access points didn't work very well for handheld devices was made...

So to start over if your planning on doing e-registration "with palms or ipaqs" i'd go with the cisco. End of the day if you have the money go for Cisco. I'm CCNA trained too so my opinion is heavily weighted also, lol.

I'm shocked that ethernet is TCP/IP though

[CyberNerd]

I'm shocked that ethernet is TCP/IP though Wink

well, it isn't. not even slightly. I know what I meant !

[plexer]

I've looked at going to 3com or Procurve to move away from Buffalo WAP which as far as I am concerned are consumer grade and their pro products are over priced.

If possible get some companie in and do some trials of kit, I am a big fan of wireless technology but only where it has a legitimate use and is not being used in areas that wired ethernet could be installed.

Again though security is a concern if you have fixed access points and as has allready been said the more secure things are the more overhead you have and therefore you have reduced capacity.

There doesn't seem to be a deinfate best secure set up as far as I can see some people use vlans etc... others WPA-PSK and others radius.

I'm looking at Elektron radius server from corriente.net but at the moment it only authenticates the user and connects to the wireless once you are logged into the laptop for our usage we need the secure wireless connection to be allready established at the login screen so students log in normally the same as anywhere else.

Corriente are working on machine authentication for the next release but they don't have an ETA on this yet I'm still pushing them to give me one.

The best thing about Elektron is the price £130 for it inluding a years maintenance which is a 50% discount on then list price. No clients are needed as it uses the built in XP one allthough you can use others with it.

Ben

[eduabncs]

Hmm..well here in our offices we use Cisco Aironet's for secure wireless access. And it works a treat and I have been told by our wireless techie bod that the implemetation we are using is about as secure as it gets. The basic setup we use is similar to the setup suggested from the Cisco site here.

You pays your money.......!

[plexer]

Yup and that's exactly the same security that Elektron gives you.

Ben