Meru or Aruba for new Wi-Fi

[neonetman]

I'm looking at replacing our currnet wirelss system in school. I've now narrowed it down to a decisiton between Aruba and Meru, but am interested in peoples perceptions of the two, and which is the better solution.

 

As always, we are not only looking at performance, but also getting the best "bang for buck" overall

[Net-Ctrl]

Hello @neonetman , out of interest, why are you not also including Ruckus in your review?

[kennysarmy]

Hello @neonetman , out of interest, why are you not also including Ruckus in your review?

 

Any why not Meraki?

[neonetman]

We've looked at a number of solutions over the last few months, and under guidance from our County Council, have narrowed down to these two options. I'm now trying to get some wider input on perceptions of the two.

[Net-Ctrl]

If you were interested in hearing more about Ruckus, please send me a DM. Even if just for comparison purposes. We can discuss how it differs from the two solutions you mention. Ruckus really does deliver awesome WiFi.

[MatthewL]

For me it would be Aruba but that is personal preference.

 

It is slowly growing in schools these days and is good kit. I used it in a NHS environment in my previous role and it worked perfectly.

[dblight]

+1 for Aruba also. We have Aruba at one school and Meru at another. Aruba has the better performance.

[AlanD]

I think most of the premier tier wireless kit is going to work just fine....Aerohive, Meraki, Aruba, Ruckus, Meru(not Fortinet) etc. I also think the APs are eye-wateringly expensive and all lock you into an annual (often cloud managed) solution which is great for businesses with multiple premises - but seems difficult to justify the cost of for a single site school. Meraki - has a brilliant web interface (but I bet you never look at it from one year to the next once you get over the initial fascination of using it), Ruckus has beamflex - and might tempt into believing that you won't really need 1 AP per classroom using this if you believed all their claims. In practice - it does typically offer faster wireless traffic - but you'd have to be using a traffic monitor to notice the difference. Meru (not Fortinet) offer their single channel architecture. In dense deployment areas like blocks of classrooms this clearly has a USP and works well in practice (so much so that the most of NI schools went for it en-block) - but it has a pretty awful user interface and its layer 7 visibility is nothing like Meraki's. I'm kind of surprised that you haven't looked at Ubiquiti. Its not as good - but seems to satisfy most schools that are using it....and its a hell of a lot cheaper with no annual costs.

[jamesreedersmith]

What about Ubiquiti - best bang for buck by miles...

[AlanD]

...and I wouldn't take too much notice of what a County Council advised....because their experiences can be pretty narrow.

 

Meraki will give a you a FREE access point (with some conditions) for doing trial....and so will Aerohive I think. You are going to need them integrated with your VLAN, RADIUS, DHCP and of course filtering.

 

And yes - I'd definitely buy a ubiquity access point because they would save you SO much both annually and up front capital cost. Sell it off on Ebay later if you decide you don't want it....someone may even give you the close price you paid for it - because they are good value for money!

 

Don't be stingy about how many access points you require. If you are going to use 5GHz (and there would be no point in buying current generation APs otherwise) remember unlike 2.4Ghz, it doesn't go through walls, doors, windows - or even bodies very well. So you will need 1 x AP per classroom - and really it needs to be on the ceiling to avoid bodies. And you will require 2x CAT6 cables to every AP to provide the bandwidth they are capable of using.

 

Remember wireless needs to be done as a complete integration to work well within your school - otherwise you are wasting your money and won't get the results you want regardless of the devices you buy. Just tacking up the odd wireless AP here and there scattered about randomly will not allow you to use class sets of laptops or tablets reliably. Its one thing getting a 2Mb/s into the corner of a remote classroom for a single device - but remember its taking the whole AP the whole of its time to deliver that. If you have 20 or 30 devices requiring 2Mb/s or better you need an AP in the room. And despite a notional 1Gb/s with "ac" access points don't expect to get anywhere near that in reality in a high density environment because of wireless "collisions" (well...unless you have MERU which does its best avoid them....)

[snagrat]

5Ghz goes through a wall perfectly well.

The one AP per class is a myth and isn't required. Ruckus will work with a AP per two classes easily and normally even less than that.

[AlanD]

"...though a wall perfectly well...." - to be honest - is not my experience. But it may be due to the fact that most of our buildings are old - and the walls are at least two bricks deep. Yes - you can connect on the other side of the wall - but only at fraction of the speed on the side the AP is positioned. We have some more modern classrooms which have paper thin walls - and we do share the odd access point between these rooms successfully - but we also have some thin walls which have some kind of metal grid in them that won't let through any signal. My advice would be to get an independent expert in to measure the signal levels with proper reports of what speeds to expect on both sides of walls. I have read independent reports about the Ruckus beamflex in real world senarios - and had one on test. They are certainly better than other APs at providing a better signal...but you have to remember that its not just how good the access point is....because the client has to talk back to the access point - and they don't have beamflex to help their transmit side. I couldn't detect any real world increases of bandwidth on the other side a wall of more than 10% - which agreed with the studies. Still - if you are installing premium APs - I'd be happy to choose Ruckus because of that. There have been several reports about whether 1 AP is really required per classroom - and with careful planning I'm guessing most schools will find there are places where the odd access point could be shared. But I also know - without the expense of a proper wireless survey that 1 x AP per classroom ceiling always delivers the goods really well - especially if you want to run domain logon laptops and high bandwidth apps - and you can pay a several extra APs with the saving on a cost of a survey. What's more you needn't then be so fussy about employing expensive APs - because as many school have discovered cheap Ubiquiti APs work really well when deployed this way.

 

Don't take my word for it. Don't take anyone else's word either. Get the free Meraki AP, and the free Aerohive AP (Meru, Ruckus, Aruba and any others you can get) - and buy a Ubiquity AP. Test them with a class of laptops on the right and wrong side a wall. Google and download some speed test software - make them all run YouTube clips in a loop. My guess is that Ruckus will work best on the wrong side of the wall but with a large drop in bandwidth. Meru/Fortinet will give you the highest speeds on the right side of the wall (because its the only one that can use wide channels in dense deployments) The Meraki interface will blow you away make you dribble over how good it is. Ubiquity will give you the poorest speeds - but not significantly so - and will be a tiny fraction of the cost. The others will be much of a muchness. Make sure you understand how they are going to integrate and work with your web filtering/monitoring/|Radius/DHCP/VLANS and DNS.

 

There is a new 802.11ah proposed standard that uses 900MHz - (much bigger waves) than 2.4 or 5GHz. This is likely to drive WiFi through all the walls in a building.

[jjohnsoncantell]

We are in a dense environment with 2/3 floors in each block and those blocks in quite close proximity to eachother. We are also in the market for an upgrade. We would like to stick with meru but open to other options. We've historically had problems with logging on classes of 20-30 whereby some users will still be sat waiting ten minutes into a lesson before they are logged on. The initial installation was not really up to scratch and we've been wating for a chance to get it overhauled.

[Net-Ctrl]

Hi @jjohnsoncantell we will be down at BETT next week with Ruckus on stand C63. We will have a range of their equipment and some knowledgable stand support to talk you through the Ruckus approach to WiFi if it was of interest.

 

Sounds like you would benefit from on-site hybrid survey with a trained WiFi engineer to properly review your RF environment and place APs accordingly.

 

If the guys that installed your MERU weren't up-to scratch this is probably a big cuase of your issues.

Edited January 19, 2017 by Net-Ctrl

[jjohnsoncantell]

Its a number of little things i believe are contributing the bigger problem but I'm in a catch 22 really. I want to upgrade the wireless to sort out the capacity and reception but with the age of the hardware we would not initially see the benefit until we upgrade the clients. However its pointless upgrading clients without the infra to back it up.

[Net-Ctrl]

it's a tough situation. I would recommend concentrating on upgrading the HW. Especially if your APs are old.

 

It you were to upgrade and go down the Wave 2 802.11ac route for example they make more efficient use of the RF spectrum by getting clients on and off the medium faster, leaving more airtime for other clients, even those that don’t support Wave 2 capabilities.

 

Because Wi-Fi is a shared medium, reducing the time to serve even some clients will benefit all clients. And as multi-user MIMO clients hit your networks, those clients will be served simultaneously—allowing others the opportunity to access the RF spectrum sooner.

 

A good analogy is car sharing. If you can get people to car share, even those who don’t benefit because there are fewer cars on the road.

 

It depends how old your APs are though. If you're running 11n and you have available budget, look at your HW and the devices will follow. In the meantime you will still benefit from a better performing network.

[Haptic]

My choice out of the original 2 posted by the OP would be Aruba.

 

Larger market share, lower costs as the deployment size increases (not sure how big a project you're looking at, however Meru upgrade costs on larger controller based deployments are eye watering)

 

Just my two penneth

 

Joe

[AlanD]

I keep coming back to ... get some test kit in. Its a no brainer. A free Meraki AP. A free Aerohive AP. I'm sure (...well I know its true because I've done it) Meru will lend you kit .... but do buy an Ubiquiti AP too (sell it again on ebay , you'll the price you paid for it if you don't keep it...). Test them in a classroom with a full class set - with the AP on the ceiling. You won't need a wireless survey if you go for one AP per classroom. My guess is that you will decide Ubiquiti does the job perfectly well for a fraction of the cost....but don't take my word for it, or anyone else's...especially not someone trying to sell you their kit.

[jjohnsoncantell]

I had a meeting with a company to get quotes to like for like upgrade my meru. They came back with not only the meru but a couple of other options which I would like your view on as to whether you have heard of/used before. One which I have noticed mentioned a lot is Ubiquity (which as suggested in this post am ordering an AP for) and the other is Huawei (yes the phone maker). Cost wise, Ubitquity is nothing in the grand scheme but the Huawei was not much further off and so its also interesting me somewhat. Anyone heard that Huawei were making wireless systems? Anyone have or used one of their systems? I'd be interested as to any feedback

THanks

[Joanne]

I used to install Huawei switches in my old job. I left when they had just started installing the wifi. The switches were very good quality for the price, so perhaps the wifi would be similar. Only problem was that the UI was in chinese so you had to CLI everything... which is painful. That was 3 years ago now, so could be different.

[AlanD]

I think that I am right in saying that Ubiquity is widely used in schools...and integrates just fine with AD/BYOD etc. Has no on going annual costs and probably less than half or even quarter of the cost of some wireless kit - a veritable market disrupter. Sorry - can't comment on Huawei, because I've never tried it. But I would put in a mention for Xclaim access points which made by Aruba - and again have no on going annual costs and come at a budget price for a serious piece of kit (limited to 4x SSIDs) with on site management tools. It only supports two streams but that's as much as most devices manage these days. Clearly Aruba brought these out to compete with the likes of Ubiquiti which robs the premier market of their customers. But be aware that Aruba has just been taken over....which might be fine...or not. Are these budget cost access points any worse - well possibly - slightly - but you'll need to do a load of tests to verify it and the difference will not be noticeable.

[snagrat]

XClaim are made by Ruckus, not Aruba

[caffrey]

Unifi is great for the money, running 37 access points here (AC-PRO) I've ran unifi stuff for a few years now and considering moving to their switchgear

[Arcolite]

Out of interest, have you considered AeroHive (controller-less).

We've been using them for the last few years and can't fault it.

[kennysarmy]

Out of interest, have you considered AeroHive (controller-less).

We've been using them for the last few years and can't fault it.

 

All options will be considered