Poll - which wireless?

[Paid_Peanuts]

Scenario: Large(1400) secondary on the cusp of operating BYOD with some 500 wireless owned school laptops (All Windows 7).

 

So, if you were faced with replacing your wireless this summer what would your choice be?

What vendors would you choose and why and would you still plump for N or go with the less tried and tested AC varients from the likes of Aruba/Ruckus/Meru?

[pantscat]

Surely you'd evaluate them all and see which one fitted your requirements best?

 

Sorry, slightly facetious answer there.

 

In all seriousness I'd look at all options - draw up a specification and see what fits best, then look at customer reference sites, talk to them and make sure it does what they claim. Then lastly get them to do a small scale PoC on site to make sure it's going to work.

You're likely to be spending a fair few pennies on this so worth their while.

Edited May 23, 2014 by pantscat

[petertec]

1400 students and BYOD would mean you would probably want to look at the true enterprise class wireless products and stay away from the likes of Ubiquiti etc.

 

I would be talking to people like Aruba, Meru and Extreme.

 

Also for most schools pervasive AC is going to be overkill. I would say that a predominantly N environment with maybe AC in the particularly dense areas would suffice.

[Ant]

I voted Ruckus as it's what we have here and I have been very impressed it.

 

Once configured, I've hardly had to do any management and ticks along nicely. The APs we have are N and not yet AC.

[Paid_Peanuts]

Surely you'd evaluate them all and see which one fitted your requirements best?

 

That I am doing, the school has the same floor plan over 3 floors, 80 classrooms, not many communal areas.

I have had "speeches" from all the big players in the market and been told why they are so much better than every other offering. I have had kit in to test, but without really turning off our old kit, putting in some 50 access points, connecting everyone up to the new test kit and stress testing it then demo'ing the kit is pretty useless other than to have a play with any interfaces.

[caffrey]

Unifi Pros here about 33 APs, went with them because budget, happy with them - a lot better than the netgear we had.

[hardtailstar]

Two schools with Ruckus here, since they have been in I havent had to do anything and thats in nearly four years

[Joanne]

I'm all for the Ruckus. Fitted it in numerous schools in my old job (primary and secondary) and I'm getting it here in my new job. Also have a look at Meraki. They are good with the cloud based controller and whatnot... or does that come under Cisco?

[browolf]

we have 1600 students and a guest wireless on ruckus and it works fine.

[tmcd35]

Personally, I'd find 3-4 independent retailers willing to come in and do full wireless surveys and have them recommend kit based on their findings and your projected usage model. Ideally I'd ask the reatilers to quote for atleast 2 if not 3 different solutions and then get them to recommend their favourite stating why.

 

Or atleast that's the strategy I'm gonna follow here if the budget ever gets approved.

[rickypike]

Voted for Xirrus as its what we have in place here - I have 19 arrays here covering the whole site, never have any issues and performance / coverage is great. Currently using a mixture of Windows and iOS devices.

[craig4gon]

Id Vote for Ubiquiti for cost and Ruckus if I had any budget

[MikeGilbert]

IME, any Enterprise wireless will deliver what you need if the site survey's done right and the supplier talks to you and knows what they're doing. 99% of wireless installs I've had described to me as being bad are bad because someone has done something wrong. Including buying the wrong kit for the job, whether that's cheapo consumer routers or incredibly high spec stuff in the wrong environment. Bad site surveys, too - we've just had a vendor "specialist" nominally do one for a potential customer, and he might as well not have bothered.

So, I'd agree totally with pantscat - talk to people locally who can do the job. Note what flavour of stuff they want to sell (should be on their website), and take that into account. Ask about reference sites, and talk to them direct.

Take a look here: Wireless Access Point Comparison - Best Enterprise and Home WAPs It's an American site, but the only place I've found that gives independent ratings of a wide range of APs.

And also, the fact that vendor X made bad products once doesn't mean they still do...

And finally, 802.11ac isn't in many devices that you're going to have yet, it's new tech and therefore will cost more than 802.11n, and so put it in your plan for a refresh in three or four years...

[10101010]

1400 students and BYOD would mean you would probably want to look at the true enterprise class wireless products and stay away from the likes of Ubiquiti etc.

 

I would be talking to people like Aruba, Meru and Extreme.

 

Also for most schools pervasive AC is going to be overkill. I would say that a predominantly N environment with maybe AC in the particularly dense areas would suffice.

 

 

Interested to hear why you (or anyone else) would avoid Ubiquiti Unifi for this scenario? I'm in a similar scenario to Paid_Peanuts and Unifi is a solution under serious consideration.

[Cablers_JonPaul]

Scenario: Large(1400) secondary on the cusp of operating BYOD with some 500 wireless owned school laptops (All Windows 7).

 

So, if you were faced with replacing your wireless this summer what would your choice be?

What vendors would you choose and why and would you still plump for N or go with the less tried and tested AC varients from the likes of Aruba/Ruckus/Meru?

 

If any school is on the cusp of operating a BYOD solution they should look at a solution like onBoarder as well as the wireless provisioning.

 

It is one tool for delivering network services, secure radius authentication and transparent proxy services making any network managers life a little easier.

Whether its a simple secure Guest deployment or full BYOD with active directory integration, onBoarder has all the tools to successfully deploy and monitor the new network. With its onboard proxy service users can connect to the network without the need for proxy settings or downloading profiles or wpad files. onBoarder works with your inhouse or upstream filtering to ensure that filtering policies are being applied to the devices.

 

It was developed working with Ruckus but will it will work with wireless solutions from other providers too. We have it deployed in large secondaries with similar usage patterns to yours.

 

We have installed several of the wireless poll choices in schools and i have no hesitation in recommending Ruckus for your wireless.

 

A word of caution for AC. Their will soon be two types of AC ratified so you will have to decide what route you go down as they will not be compatible. Phase two is looking a better option at the moment. You will also need to be very careful when buying new equipment to work on AC. You will need multi-spacial stream wireless cards installed which can really push the price of laptops etc to the point of unaffordable for schools.

Site wide deployment of AC can be self defeating with interference problems. It can be great in a dense high usage area such as a hall or lecture theatre and can integrate with a standard wireless deployment.

 

AC is a really big can of worms and there are too many people trying to sell it for the sake of selling it. Get some good advice from a wireless specialist first. Contact us direct if you want to know more.

[Paid_Peanuts]

Interested to hear why you (or anyone else) would avoid Ubiquiti Unifi for this scenario? I'm in a similar scenario to Paid_Peanuts and Unifi is a solution under serious consideration.

 

Have you priced up the Ubiquiti alternative? After some negotiation I have received a very favorable Ruckus price for their AC solution based around a pair of controllers and 50 of their R700 access points. I'd be interested to know how much cheaper (if at all) the Unifi solution is.

I originally discounted them on the fact they have little to no support presence within the UK.

[10101010]

Have you priced up the Ubiquiti alternative? After some negotiation I have received a very favorable Ruckus price for their AC solution based around a pair of controllers and 50 of their R700 access points. I'd be interested to know how much cheaper (if at all) the Unifi solution is.

I originally discounted them on the fact they have little to no support presence within the UK.

 

Price wise, I don't think you can get the unifi stuff much cheaper than the resellers around on the net, but I was only looking at the Ubiquiti UniFi UAP-PRO model. I would need to change my edge switches and run additional network points to use the AC model which I didn't really want do this time around. So typically for a pack of three of the Ubiquiti UniFi UAP-PRO I had found a price of £401.27 and the controller is software based so no controller costs involved. You can do the maths, it's pretty cheap. There are a few threads on this subject, pros and cons etc, m25man really knows his stuff when it comes to wireless networks so look out for his comments.

 

I agree with your comment about support.

[caffrey]

I think I've roughly spent 4k ish on unifi - thats 34 access points and all the PoE switches for each cab and it's been great

[10101010]

I think I've roughly spent 4k ish on unifi - thats 34 access points and all the PoE switches for each cab and it's been great

 

which unifi model did you purchase for that price?

[caffrey]

UAP pros and toughswitches,

 

11 x 3 packs

and 5 toughswitches

 

Controller is on VM

 

I mathed wrong sorry, cost 5k (I checked my PO's)

.

They probably dont do all the singing and dancing of more expensive units, but for what they are they are great

[Griff]

We are using Cisco stuff here installed it all ourselves the downside is the access points are now EOL which means we cannot expand the coverage unless we overhaul the whole lot...well that was the impression Cisco gave me. The system itself is awesome not really had any major problems the only downside was the learning curve of setting it all up solo but hey got there in the end

[StevieM]

I'm so glad this poll has come up. We have a completely wired infrastructure at the moment, but need to look into WLAN and mobile devices as part of our school development plan. I was talking to the net-ctrl guys (and @Domino) about Ruckus at EDIT2014 last week. Looks like it's getting the thumbs up from a lot of people here too.

 

AC is a really big can of worms and there are too many people trying to sell it for the sake of selling it. Get some good advice from a wireless specialist first. Contact us direct if you want to know more.

 

That was the impression I got from Meru, too. He spent quite a lot of time talking about it's capabilities, but ended with a 'but realistically...'.

[ass17]

+1 for Ruckus

[DMcCoy]

Interested to hear why you (or anyone else) would avoid Ubiquiti Unifi for this scenario? I'm in a similar scenario to Paid_Peanuts and Unifi is a solution under serious consideration.

 

No central RADIUS (all APs are clients)

Maximum of 4 SSIDs

No VLAN assignment based on RADIUS authentication

Reboot to apply changes

Very little RF info

No *option* to direct traffic via controller with secure link (Ruckus isn't good at this, but it can be done for a small number of APs. Aruba is good at this).

No option to enable client isolation if the WLAN *isn't* a guest network

Very little traffic control.

 

 

Unifi is cheap, works and is better than consumer wireless, it DOES NOT have a full set of enterprise features.

[petertec]

Interested to hear why you (or anyone else) would avoid Ubiquiti Unifi for this scenario? I'm in a similar scenario to Paid_Peanuts and Unifi is a solution under serious consideration.

 

For me Ubiquiti isn't in the same league as Aruba, Meru, Extreme etc. I would place it somewhere between those guys and the really basic solutions such as Netgear. Fine for a small primary maybe but to me 1400 students and a one to one BYOD policy means that these are the solutions that need to be looked at. When you think of the additional functionality that these solutions offer in terms of Network access control and Network management then they are the better long term option. It depends on the context and the individual needs of the school but there is no doubt there is a massive difference in quality and obviously that brings with it a cost difference as well.