What are people's experiences with Meraki APs failing?

[Rprouty]

Why did you leave Cisco Wireless and move to Meraki?

[kearton]

90 x MR18 here and no probs since they were installed last Easter

As someone who is considering Meraki for our new wireless install has anyone with an MR18 had one fail? I've got one of the free ones from the webinar (MR18) and its been fine.

[Gaz]

90 x MR18 here and no probs since they were installed last Easter

 

Yeah we have 6 now and no problems at all, looking to hopefully purchase the new MR32 AC units for another building. I love the visibility they give over the use of the wifi.

[clockend25]

33 points here that went in last summer and we haven't had any issues with the APs as of yet. All MR18s and 26s.

[Strawdog]

Our setup has stabilised considerably - the biggest impact has been chasing the various third parties and getting them to do the work (as we are locked out from administering it but appear to be the ones responsible for troubleshooting and advising them how to reconfigure it) rather than the performance of the technology itself.

 

We did have a problem with band steering on OS:X clients with them frequently (every 5-10 minutes in some cases) jumping between 2.4GHz and 5GHz which caused us a lot of issues with AirPlay and other Bonjour services - we cured this by switching to 5GHz only on the SSID in question* although this had its own issues (we discovered lots of our Epson AirPrint printers only work on 2.4GHz so they all had to be hardwired as this was the lesser of 2 evils).

 

kearton - out of interest what size geographical area/how many classrooms and what client density are you covering with the 90 APs?

 

*we've also since disabled Bonjour forwarding on this SSID (on the advice of Meraki) as all the OS:X/iOS clients, MacPro servers, Apple TVs and AirPrint printers sit within the same VLAN.

Edited January 9, 2015 by Strawdog

[merklo]

We have 1100+ MR24/26 with more on the way, and a handful of MR66. I believe we had 11 RMAs over last 18 months, all bricked in some fashion--most of these were failed firmware upgrades, that could not be recovered by factory reset, and a handful of just outright dead (no LEDs).

 

Our issues are mostly with iOS devices: to get various iPads to play ball we had to tune down radios to eliminate any overlap, and had to manually channel 2.4Ghz radios at each site (1,6,11). AP overlap and auto-selection simply did not work for iPads, most would connect to one AP and stick to it for dear life even if a closer AP was readily available. Other than that, biggest issue is having enough APs to avoid deadzones in rooms that have high interference construction.

 

We did see connectivity issues/drops with OS 10.7/8 but we only have a handful of those, so it did not get much attention.

[Techie2000]

Sorry to jump on this post - I am looking at replacing our current D-Link system (which is intermittent and now somewhat dated) with a Meraki solution - At home I have an MR18 being used for personal use - but I don't have the means to stress test it with several devices. The issue I have at school is the number of wireless devices in a small area - within 50feet we have 5 - 6 APs with over 200 devices connecting - with everyone's experience, how would the Meraki MR18's handle with this? Our current D-Link system seems to drop connection when trying to find the next available AP - most of the time with users experiencing issues in reconnecting.

[Strawdog]

Techie2000 - Personally I'd recommend going for MR26 units rather than MR18s, they don't cost much more and they're a much better unit. Without a bit more detail* I'd provisionally say 2-3 MR26 APs would be fine for your needs.

 

*Does the switch(es) you'll be connecting them to have PoE and gigabit ports?

Is your cabling CAT6?

What are the clients (Win, OS:X, iOS, Android, etc.)?

What wireless standards do the clients support (802.11a/b/g/n)?

What kind of physical environment will you be putting them into (external walls, lots of metal work, high levels of radio interference, etc.)?

How many concurrent clients will be connecting?

What sort of bandwidth are the clients likely to consume?

If lots of the bandwidth is web based content what speed is your internet connection?

[Techie2000]

Thanks! I think we will need some newer wiring first - the current wiring is date stamped Cat5 1999 (even I was in school back then!!!). Thanks again, your advice is much appreciated.

[roadhouse1387]

Guys, We are a meraki Partner and around the time the OP is talking about, there was a known issue with MR16's where a software update was pushed out from Meraki and it caused AP's with a certain type and manufacturing cycle or Wireless chipset to fail. As far as we know it only affected MR16's but it was certainly there. It wiped one of our clients out completely and caused about 30 ish (if i recall) AP's out if 90 to fail at another client.

 

Must say though, Meraki were great and dealt with it very promptly, replacements next day. The kit is rock solid now and has been for some time, even before the introduction of the the MR18. we have loads of customers with Meraki AP's installed now and have no problems at all with them.

 

if you are still having issues with MR16's failing with a red light and no amount of hardware resets will fixit, its likely that its one of these old bits of kit. You should be able to tell because they are marked with the 'Meraki' logo rather than the 'Cisco' one as this was before Cisco 'borged' them.

 

 

Cheers