New Wireless System what to go for

[aidenbran2000]

Ok we have just secured some much needed funds to update the wireless in the school!

 

Now the 3 main companies i am looking at are Ubiquiti - Ruckus and Aruba. Can anyone give me any pros and cons of any of them and what sort of price they paid for their solution.

[Killer_Bot]

Any reason you're not looking at Meraki? I only have limited experience with Meru and Meraki but always found the latter really good.

[rogerdnixon]

We have used Aerohive for years - works well with our 1:1 Chromebooks. Highly configurable. One to consider maybe - don't know about others.

[psydii]

Meraki have a 10yr warranty and support option. (think about that - Governors/The Head can put off having to fund a replacement for 10 years!)

 

Aruba IAPs (but not the APs) have similar support.

 

Ubiquity is best effort peer to peer via a forum.

 

Ruckus have good things said about them. I have no experience of them so cannot comment further.

 

You get what you pay for.

 

If you are spending more than 0.4% of your school's budget, you really ought to get a 6 AP demonstration network installed and load test it with your clients. Other things to consider are ease of day to day management, troubleshooting reporting and monitoring.

 

6APs is the bare minimum to ensure you see a demonstration of how they handle the inevitable overlapping channels that you will have in whole school network. Half terms are great for this sort of test. The 0.4% figure is personal opinion. Cover your back, it will be no fun if there are problems and someone senior asks: "did you test a pilot installation before proceeding?"

[localzuk]

I've looked at others, and always drift back to Ruckus. Just works. Solid as a rock, and can be scaled to your exact needs. We're shortly going to have it at 4 sites all using one central controller here.

 

Pricing really really depends on how dense your environment is. If you're 1 device per child and have terrible signal propagation in your buildings, that's going to cost a lot more than a site where signal travels and you only have teacher devices connected.

[rich_tech]

Aerohive here too, excellent system, no fuss setup too and very configurable

[synaesthesia]

Always favoured Ubiquiti here for obvious reasons, pricing is astonishing and the featureset is enough. Not as much as Ruckus etc but nothing that would generally be missed in a school. Performance good, reliability excellent, ease of setup is far better than any of the big boys. However as much as I love them, be careful how you pitch that to SLT. If you're happy to do the initial setup yourself etc then go for it, however it would be easy to present 3 or 4 options and the powers that be will see 4 options going way over £10,000 and 1 for around £3000. You'd have to work hard to get approval for anything else!

[AlanD]

 

You get what you pay for.

 

Sorry, I rarely find myself able to agree with that statement. I'd be happier with the line that you get what you deserve from the effort put in to make your choice.

 

Remember that all access points use the same chipsets and microcode that determines how 802.11 standard is implemented. The only thing that differentiates the products is the management layer. So you will not get wildly different performance speeds from one system compared to another.

 

Be clear what you want to achieve. Suppliers will practically promise you anything and everything to get your custom. If you can only afford 1 AP per group of 4 classrooms they will produce this solution. But if you are using class sets of devices...especially domain laptops you are likely to find it frustratingly slow.

 

To get the best data rates you will need an access point in every classroom - and they need to be centrally and ceiling mounted.

 

And of course, it goes almost without saying that without good wireless clients new access points won't make much noticeable difference. Or at least no difference without getting out a stop watch.

 

My mantra is to advise everyone to get in sample test kit ..from meraki, ruckus, aerohive...and of course ubiquiti. You might also consider Meru, now fortinet, because their single channel architecture is.....technically interesting, although I'm not convinced it is actually much better than other products now. Ubiquity is so cheap no one will lend you kit, but it's cheap enough to buy and sell on eBay where you will get the about the same price as you paid for it!

 

Gigabit speeds of 800Mb/s or more are to be taken with a pinch of salt.

 

Connection speeds reported by access points and wireless clients are a theoretical maximum for perfect conditions. Typically these figures are UDP traffic, and sending ACK packets take just as long so divide by 2 to start with. And by the time you have taken into account management, error correction and the rest you can divide by another 2. Sometimes these theoretical figures are based on 160Mhz channel. There are currently no wave2 or wave1 "ac" access points capable of 160Mhz channels ... and even if they were you could only use one ap in a building well distanced from any other part of the school like a sports hall. X2 and X3 streams only give around X1.5 improvement at best because they rely on spatial separation...in fact it's often more like X1.2 Oh, and in a dense block of classrooms access points will probably not use 80Mhz channels and fall back to 40Mhz so it's about the same as old n access points.

 

So expect beaten 100 and 200Mb/s of real world wide data rates at the very best using latest clients. Nothing like the connection speed of a cable to gigabit switch.

 

And while Mu-MIMO is a good thing don't imagine that picture they draw with an access point streaming simultaneously to 4 clients is representative of the real world. To start with one of those stream disappears entirely to manage the process. And the reset rely on spatial separation of 4 simultaneous transmissions on the same frequency. Like 4 people talking to you at once - you might gather more information tan a single conversation...but only just. They claim figures of up to x1.8 compared to a single stream. But "up to" is an advertising phrase. Think more like x1.2 compared to a single stream.

 

Personally...I think meraki interface is brilliant...but value for money Ubiquity is hard to beat. Ruckus probably goes better through walls (but you don't want be going through walls you need an AP per classroom). I use Aerohive - but that is almost an accidental choice - and I don't pay for their cloud/annual support and manage them with command line. Don't take my word for it. ...don't take anyone else's word either. Get some kit in and test it.

 

School need a Ford Modeo Solution, maybe even a one year old low mileage Mondeo - not a Rolls Royce solution. Do you get more for your money when you pay for a Rolls Royce - absolutely. But both travel at 70Mph on a motorway just fine. All business access points do load balancing, auto channel selection, signal strength control, band streering, QoS, Multi SSID, Vlans, Radius etc. Yes, some do some of these things neater than others but they basically all do the same job equally well - or equally badly.

Edited June 15, 2017 by AlanD

[aidenbran2000]

I visited a school which had Ruckus which had nothing but good things to say. Aruba points look good but expensive and ubiquiti pricing makes them good value. We have thick walls in the school which makes it a nightmare so may need more points than usual to get through the walls.

 

I have seen so many positive reports of ubiquiti on here that makes me want to look at them

 

If anyone could give me a rough price they paid for Ruckus it would be great to know.

[synaesthesia]

Roughly speaking, a grand for controller, 300 per access point, then I think another few hundred for a pack of licenses, then £silly for support.

[Connor_Net-Ctrl]

Hi @aidenbran2000 we're a leading Ruckus reseller based in the UK and have a vast number of Ruckus customers within education, if you wish to explore Ruckus further and would like to organise a technical chat to discuss your requirements i'm more than happy to facilitate this for you. Drop me a PM and we'll get it sorted!

[zag]

Aruba interface is complicated but rock solid in terms of stability and very fast around our site.

[AlanD]

We have thick walls in the school which makes it a nightmare so may need more points than usual to get through the walls.

.

 

Ruckus make a big deal out of their "Beamforming" technology. And - to be fair its good - you might get twice the data rate through a thick wall compared to other access points. BUT...and its a really big BUT..... 5Ghz does not go well through walls...its doesn't even go well through bodies in a classroom. All those high data rates disappear when going through a wall...even not such a thick wall. And while Ruckus might deliver twice the data rate getting 4Mb/s rather than 2Mb/s isn't much help because you need a lot more than 4Mb/s to deliver to a classroom of computers - you need 200Mb/s. You WILL need an access point in every classroom to support class sets of laptops. And you will need those access points ceiling mounted in the centre part of the room to maximize spatial separation of streams and avoid as many bodies as possible. And remember - while Ruckus does indeed deliver faster traffic through a wall - its only in one direction - as your clients don't have their beam forming technology so its only half the traffic at best that is quicker. Of course 2.4Ghz goes fine through a wall but you will struggle to support a class set of devices using narrow 20Mhz channels compared to the 80Mhz channel you (might) get with a new "ac" access point on 5Ghz.

[Andycat]

We've been Meru (now Fortinet) on AC for nearly 4 years. Some minor issues, but generally fine day to day. We have 1600 ipads, and 300 domained Laptops. (1220 connected, in use, as I type).

 

Support is ok, we've had a new controller under warranty (although it turned out to be software) but stuff needs to go back to France for repair.

[DJ-1701]

I have to say, Ruckus has made a very noticable difference here from complaints everyday with connectivity to virtually none (and when there are, it's the laptop ). As @Connor_Net-Ctrl says they are one of the leading companies that supply this, and I believe the first to deal with them when they entered the UK market, for them to go with them for this long says something about Ruckus.

 

As for @Net-Ctrl themselves, we have had them in the Primary to survey and install the WiFi and they were fantastic, I have never had an installation of anything go so smoothly. I definately 100% recommend them with no second thoughts.

[NB9457]

As said, Ubiquiti kit is worth a look. I am strongly considering full Ubiquiti network, price and performance seems stop on, easy to use and for a school, it ticks a lot of boxes

[synaesthesia]

Unifi is easy enough to price up. For instance you can go for the latest and greatest UAP-AC-HD Wave 2 access points at around £240 each.

That's it. No licensing, no controller; set that up yourself on an existing machine or VM for nothing. Back it up now and then. No controller therefore to go wrong. Keep a couple of AP's spare in the case of failure or expansion.

[psydii]

Sorry, I rarely find myself able to agree with that statement. I'd be happier with the line that you get what you deserve from the effort put in to make your choice.

 

Fair point. However the last big "bake-off" did show significant difference in performance under load of APs with very similar hardware.

 

This video is pretty good at explaining what performance you will see from 802.11ac as you fill a room with devices - the drop-off is pretty dramatic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMBcE0sV5Bw&t=617s

and considerably more pessimistic that 100Mb/s on a busy wlan.

[mavhc]

Does no one else use Cisco Wireless?

[localzuk]

Roughly speaking, a grand for controller, 300 per access point, then I think another few hundred for a pack of licenses, then £silly for support.

A little over generalised.

 

R310 you're looking less than £300.

R510 about £350.

R610 about £460.

R710 around £650.

 

Controller about a grand, yep.

 

License per AP about £75, and 3 years support about £60. So, you can do it very cheap if you go with the R310, but you aren't going to get density with that. We pick and choose here. In high density areas (classrooms) R710s, in admin offices R510's and "in betweens" get R610s. Our nursery got an R310 as they have 4 tablets, and that's it.

[synaesthesia]

Yeah, I was going from memory for what one of my schools recently bought, needed to get a few more AP's in and licenses to go with. The controllers generally come with a pack of 5 licenses, so if you need 12 AP's you'd need to buy another 7 licenses separately.

I think they had R510 AP's in. Their support was very good when I was trying to get my head round the licensing; their reseller not so much!

[LeMarchand]

Does no one else use Cisco Wireless?

 

Had it at one school, was generally OK (apart from in one class) but when the controller went wrong out of warranty it was a heck of a job finding someone who could deal with it. Total overkill for that school, though.

[AlanD]

Don't forget to consider PoE. Often access points will claim they work off 802.11af - which they will. What they don't always tell you - and some don't realise - is that you won't get all the performance with 802.11af. So you might only get 2 or 1 of the 3 (or 4) streams - or doesn't allow you to use LACP with the second Ethernet port (if it has one). These things may not matter - but if they do - replacing your PoE switches costs money you might not expect to spend. Ubiquity (I think) comes with lnline PoE adaptors for 802.11at provided you buy the individual units - but not if you buy the multi packs. (is that right?)

 

And if you are going to allow BYOD use - that might have an impact on your router/firewall throughput capability and indeed your external internet bandwidth.

 

I replaced some pre "n" wireless cards in old laptops with "n" ones for £2 each off Ebay - which at least made them almost useable. I could have bought "ac" cards but they were over £20 each which I thought wasn't a great investment in what was already old kit.

 

Even with all the right access points and kit.... managing teacher/user expectations is important too. If teacher tell a class to get out laptops from a cabinet which might not have been off for several days - there is a change they will download virus updates and windows updates and GPOs so getting enough bandwidth for a class to logon before the end of the lesson can be a challenge. Make sure laptops in cabinets are powered on and updated before the cabinet is in the classroom and get the teacher to tell students to collect a laptop and login as they arrive - rather than "now all login" at some later point in the lesson.

[synaesthesia]

Ubiquity (I think) comes with lnline PoE adaptors for 802.11at provided you buy the individual units - but not if you buy the multi packs. (is that right?)

 

Yup, that's right. Although thankfully all the higher end units are now properly compliant and will work out of the box with any decent POE switch or adapter.

[LeMarchand]

Ubiquity (I think) comes with lnline PoE adaptors for 802.11at provided you buy the individual units - but not if you buy the multi packs. (is that right?)

 

I've always had adapters in the multipacks.