Potential Move from Meraki to Ubiquiti

[mattysmith80]

Morning,

 

Im after some advice, after using Meraki for several years for our Wifi setup across our Multi Academy Trust its at the point where our Meraki licence renewal has come up. The pricing from our renewal has really made me wonder should I be doing something different. Alot of the Meraki hardware is over 5 years old, so when you actually look at it we need to renew the licencing aswel as the hardware.

 

Enter Ubiquiti... been playing with Ubiquiti for a bit now and we are very impressed with it. The hardware is good, no ongoing software licences, easy to set up and can manage everything from one page just like Meraki.

 

Now before jumping in feet first has anyone made this jump ? We currently have 266 APS across 9 schools so quite a big undertaking if we do make the switch. Nothing too daunting mind to get rid of a long term licence subscription.

 

Thanks - I welcome your feedback

[synaesthesia]

Yes, nowhere near as many AP's however we've never regretted it. The low cost point of the better AP's is still way lower than anything else plus the bonus of no running costs. If you're doing it centrally then you can manage all the unifi installations from a single cloud instance or a centrally hosted server of your own and grant each site permissions to manage their own without issue. Everything just works. I would seriously consider higher end options if you are 1:1 as I don't have experience of that usage level and haven't seen many others who have either. That'd be my only real concern, if it could cope.

[supportman]

I like Ubiquiti and would definitely move to them if we had any new license fees.

[MatthewL]

How many SSID's are you looking to push out as Ubiquiti only supports 4 I believe.

[ITGuyWestMidlands]

You shouldn't really look at going any more than 4 for performance reasons

[Opendium_Steve]

Ubiquity is pretty good kit these days (there were a few features that were missing in the early days, such as Framed-IP-Address in the RADIUS accounting data, but that's long since been implemented and seems to work ok). Not heard of any serious problems.

 

As MatthewL says they are restricted on the number of SSIDs they allow, but having lots of SSIDs kills your network bandwidth, so you should avoid it anyway - realistically you shouldn't need more than 2 or 3 SSIDs. Typically I do something like:

* The main SSID - uses 802.1x authentication, backed by Radius - shoves people into the appropriate VLANs based on their authentication credentials (so staff go in a separate vlan to students, etc).

* A WPA2 PSK authenticated VLAN for those few troublesome devices that don't support 802.1x.

* Maybe a guest SSID... although this can be done through the main SSID instead if you prefer.

[Simcfc73]

I am slowly moving to Ubiquiti. I hate the fact it defaults to install into your profile and you need to move it somewhere else.

 

I've got byod access setup on my Ruckus gear, havent tackled that with the Ubiquiti stuff yet. Such a wate all the shiny ruckus gear I bought especially the 2 controllers which would easily pay for new UB stuff on their own.

[Blue_Cookeh]

Been using Ubiquiti since the original release of the Gen 1 APs (about 7 years ago?) and we've not looked back. Over the summer we upgraded everything to UAP AC Lite APs. We cover our playing field with two of their outdoor APs coupled with their Sector antennas which work brilliantly for our iPads and WiFi VoIP phones.

 

I toyed with the idea of Meraki earlier this year. They wanted in the region of £15 - 20,000 for our primary school plus yearly licensing costs. It was ludicrous, that would pay for our Ubiquiti upgrade 6 times over and we've seen no performance issues. They're so cheap we can keep a 5 pack on the shelf as spares.

 

We have 2 SSIDs, one 8021x and one Guest, turned off the slower speeds and turned the power down so we can have one AP per classroom (roughly).

Edited October 18, 2018 by Blue_Cookeh

[AlanD]

How many SSID's are you looking to push out as Ubiquiti only supports 4 I believe.

 

Yes - you never want more than 4. In fact I would be trying to keep it down to a single SSID.

 

If you read the tech descriptions - you will be amazed at how much "airspace" is taken up by the AP simply advertising these SSIDs. You can - for some APs stretch the time period between these broadcasts, but it remains really poor practice.

 

I would use Enterprise authentication (from AD) and allocate access permissions depending on groups (rather than which SSID they used) . And I'd include guests in this too, but if I had to give them a second SSID I might relent.

[kidpressingbuttons]

This summer I change all of our switching and Cctv over to unifi and loved it so far. Installed the Wi-Fi on Thursday which was ridiculously easy. Speeds and coverage are great!

[bwestlake]

Meraki for gateway, unify for switches + APs

[mattysmith80]

Hi, apologies for not getting back to everyone and saying thank you for everyones advice. We decided in the end to pull the plug on Meraki. We are currently installing 230 Ubiquti APs across 9 schools before Jan so its going to be fun thats for sure. We have already done the largest Secondary and to be honest was spot on. Letting it bed in for a week or so and then cracking on with the others.

The ubiquiti software is incredibility easy to use and set everything up and to be honest literally is just like managing the Meraki kit.

 

I still like the Meraki product and always did a job for us but really I dont know how long term their business model can survive in schools.

 

Our licence cost was £30k for 9 Schools and we will be 15 schools soon probably eventually being 36 in next two years so the cost for the licence would have become ridiculous. Not to mention the fact most of our Meraki APs are MR16s the orginal Meraki hardware so would need replacing over the next year so by the time you add the hardward replacment cost to the licence its just crazy.

 

I was able to purchase 230 Ubiquiti Nano HD APs for £27k with no ongoing licence cost.

 

So all in all, a no brainer...

 

Thanks for all your input

[supportman]

I was able to purchase 230 Ubiquiti Nano HD APs for £27k with no ongoing licence cost.

 

How does the management of Ubiquiti work? Does it have a controller or is it cloud based?

 

Also how did you migrate? Did you just keep the same SSID and passcode?

 

EDIT: The interface looks lovely! https://demo.ubnt.com/manage/site/default/dashboard

Edited November 21, 2018 by supportman

[strawberry]

How many SSID's are you looking to push out as Ubiquiti only supports 4 I believe.

 

It supports 4 per group, but you can assign different groups to different AP's.

[mattysmith80]

Alot depends on how big your deployment is, if your a single primary school you can purchase a cloud key (https://www.scan.co.uk/products/ubiquiti-unifi-cloud-key-controller-device-management-uc-ck-poe?gclid=CjwKCAiAodTfBRBEEiwAa1haund-EYcduoP1PmbTxgejlE474mdoDFHr0V4wWQPaVQaHEFgDPl7OgxoCSKQQAvD_BwE)

 

The cloud key sits on your network and effectivly manages your APs. It has a web interface which you can actually link to a cloud account enabling management from anywhere.

 

If your a large secondary / MAT then you can do what we did. We spun up a linux VM and installed the management software on it. In essence its the same as a cloud key but far more flexible in terms of amount of APs it can manage. The more APs the higher spec the VM becomes effectively.

 

The process of setting it up once the VM / Cloud key is set up is just like Meraki, you adopt the AP into the management and off you go, just like the Meraki Claim process.

[adamsund]

There is a way of increasing the number of SSIDs to 8 per group but the option you need to change to do it escapes me at the minute. If anyone is interested I will find out.

[AlanD]

I repeat....you do NOT want to have large numbers of SSIDs. Simply advertising all these SSIDs can take up a significant part of your bandwidth. Ideally use just one...and use your radius authentication and active directly groups to allocate rules subsequently to control who can do what. You can usually increase the period between broadcasts if you start meddling, but otherwise they advertise at the lowest supported rate - which might be "802.11b" unless you have disabled it...which would also be sensible. Meraki suggest a maximum of 3. I would make it 2...by using one for radius authentication...and the other for devices that connect only with WPA

 

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/WiFi_Basics_and_Best_Practices/Multi-SSID_Deployment_Considerations

 

There are technical documents floating about on the web (of course I can't find one right now)...but once you have seen the impact of several SSIDs you will decide to do everything possible to reduce them to as low count as possible....certainly no more than 3.

[AlanD]

Ah ...found it...

 

SSID Overhead - How Many Wi-Fi SSIDs Are Too Many? — Revolution Wi-Fi

 

As you can see, 3 x SSIDs take a significant part of your traffic space. Not much point in in deploying expensive new APs, and then wiping out all the gains...

[MatthewL]

Be interesting to see an updated version of that based on the new wireless standards rather than on just 802.11b now ac is out. Still agree you only need 1 or 2 but curious.