Wireless Refresh, Aerohive?

[lmrogers]

Hi All,

 

I'm looking into a wireless system refresh and just wondered what systems others are using and their reccomendations.

 

I had a meeting with a supplier today and they mentioned and suggested Aerohive?

 

What are peoples thoughts?

 

Cheers

[busby]

I cant coment on areohive but have a look at meraki.

[dry]

We're an average/large primary and we went with Ubiquiti's Unifi. It's simple and plug & play (ish) which I'm sure is desirable for many IT workers, but I feel the interface is a little too dumbed down for my liking. I can't dispute it's reliability though. I haven't had to touch an AP since we've installed it, whereas our old Netgear APs would have to be rebooted fairly frequently.

 

Our bursar likes it as there's no ongoing license cost (unlike Meraki). While we were looking at potential solutions I had a webinar with Meraki and was very impressed with their ecosystem. They offer a MDM for free (up to 100 devices I think?) which uses the same UI as their switches and APs do.

[ajrw-VIADEX]

Highly depends on the type of business, what type of organisation is it?

[rogerdnixon]

We use Aerohive and have 58 APs around the site. Works well, all managed in the cloud. It offers very granular control over your WiFi which can be a bit intimidating at first, but is ultimately very useful to tweak the best out of your APs. This is important to use as we have a very wide variety of buildings that demand very different radio profiles to work effectively. We use LAN3 normally for APs who have been very good over the years.

[foofighterjim]

Using Aerohive here with great success, it was a close call between that and Ruckus. In the end there were certain things that Aerohive does that was a better fit for us; such as PPSK for devices that don't support 802.1x, VLAN and firewall policy being applied at the AP. The Ruckus solution quoted covered our site with fewer APs but it didn't help with density if you have one AP covering 4 rooms. Once I factored in how many APs we would really need and added the warranty (not included by default!) it was a no brainer for us to go with Aerohive. We also looked at Meru but it was completely out of our price range.

 

It really does boil down to your requirements.

[Wave9_Andy]

Hi there - Busby mentioned Meraki. We think it is a great product and would be happy to talk to you about it if you wish to evaluate a few options. We are a certified Meraki MSP with a specialism in education!!! (and a proud Edugeek forum sponsor!)

 

You can find out a little more from our site including a couple of case studies here

 

A good first step would be to join a Meraki webinar and receive a free AP. The next introduction to cloud networking demo is next Tuesday at 10AM.

 

They do tend to focus on the tools relating to managing multi sites which may or may not be applicable to you but it does show the intuitiveness of the dashboard. You also have the opportunity to ask them questions about stuff thats more pertinent to you. Eg. Layer 7 application control, MDM etc...

 

Let me know if we can be of any help.

 

Cheers

 

Andy

[lmrogers]

Has anyone used a Ubiquiti wireless solution/APs before?

[MattDLEA]

Ubiquiti at one of my primary schools and works spot on and so much cheaper then the netgear solution we have in my other school which is slow and drops out.

 

AS mentioned above you but the AP's and thats it. No on going licencing for stuff that you potentially may not use.

[lmrogers]

Would you say it could be suitable for a BYOD/1 to 1 solution with the ability to monitor and control guest access? That's with about 1300 students and around 200 staff?