Which Wireless

[Homeland]

I am about to receive a budget which must be spent on infrastructure of around £20K, our current wireless solution is awfull

and I am looking to replace it, I will be needing around 22 AP's to be situated around the school.

 

My choices have been narrowed down to either the following;

 

Meraki cloud controller with 22 MR24 Ap's or Ruckus 3000 ZD and 25 of the 7982 Ap's (there are 25 of these because I believe that's whats in the offer).

 

Whilst I do like Meraki's cloud controller it does seem very expensive especially with the extra licence cost every 3 years which would work out

at around another £4K every 4 years.

 

But I have also been told that the throughput of the 7982 is around 450 Mbps compared to the MR24 at 900 Mbps.

 

Has anybody ever compared the two systems, if you forget about the cost which is actually the better system ???

[pritchardavid]

Did you have a look at the HP Procurve wireless routors and controller, we have this, works with no problem. Will be glad to get rid of the older HP wireless routors that are not managed from controller, makes it a lot easier to monitor and change settings.

[Chris_Cook]

I've not compared the two personally, but as a ruckus user, I can say you wont be disappointed if you choose it. There are plenty of happy ruckus customers on here.

[elsiegee40]

We considered Meraki, but Ruckus ticked all our boxes and we got a very good deal at the end of the vendor's sales quarter.

[Homeland]

Look at Ubiquiti Unifis there new 802.11ac points have been announced and are due out in a few months, £250 each so just over £5k for your access points and even if you use a dedicated server £1k you are still well under budget and would have an 802.111ac network which will easily out perform the above.

 

That sounds really cheap if they technology is better why is that ??? also why does it need a dedicated server ???

[jamesreedersmith]

That sounds really cheap if they technology is better why is that ??? also why does it need a dedicated server ???

 

Market disruptive pricing

 

you dont need a dedicated server ( could be a vm, cloud based or run on another server) just depends if you want to use the ticketing, captive portal features etc that it offers.

[Homeland]

I don't really know much about that system is it easy to setup and are the AP's then managed centrally ???

[jamesreedersmith]

I don't really know much about that system is it easy to setup and are the AP's then managed centrally ???

 

Yes very install, install the AP, install the controller software, adpot and configure!

v3 also has loads of new features - zero handoff roaming is a big new one.

[synaesthesia]

Unifi is fantastic, it really is worthwhile. We only have 3 points and we've had no problems (other than getting it to work on our new infrastructure which is unrelated). I have a Ruckus install in one of my primaries - it works, it has intermittent issues but again not sure if that's the points (did a firmware update last week to try and resolve a heartbeat lost issue) or a shoddy install job. When it does work it just works, the interface is good.

 

Re unifi you do need a "dedicated server" but that isn't actually a full box - therefore it has less hardware than the likes of Ruckus that has dedicated hardware controllers. It's just a software package you install on any server. It'll not use any real resources, only when using the guest portal and even then a 486 could run it

[Homeland]

Thanks or that guys I might buy one to put on the laptop trolley and aske the staff to plug it in before they use the trolley

if performance is good it could save me a fortune

[m25man]

http://www.edugeek.net/showthread.php?p=692424#post692424

Two years later, and with over 1800 APs installed I don't use anything else.

[Homeland]

Wireless Help

Two years later, and with over 1800 APs installed I don't use anything else.

 

1800 ap's are you providing wifi for the whole of Essex ???

[synaesthesia]

how else do you think they get that tan?

[Obiwan]

I am working with a special school that is looking to improve upon it's currently mixed bag of stand alone WAPs. The school is in two buildings and quite spread out. The numbers of devices and users is pretty low (<20), as is the budget. I estimate we will require between 6-10 WAPs. Reading up on UniFi, using a software based controller appeals to keep the cost down and the devices aren't too expensive either. For a small system are they likely to be the best value? Any other recommendations?

 

edit: Are they any additional software costs?

Edited April 24, 2013 by Obiwan

[m25man]

There is no cheaper managed solution, there are no additional costs.