scotty Posted March 9, 2006 Posted March 9, 2006 I'm looking at covering our whole site with wireless, the two main providers I'm interested in are 3com and Cisco. I have already had the survey carried out which came to the conclusion that we would require 32 AP's. After receiving quotes from both 3com and Cisco the difference in price is approx 5k obviously the Cisco solution been the most expensive. I was wondering if anybody else has experience of both solutions out there and may be able to justify that it's worth spending the extra 5k for Cisco or if anyone can reasssure me that although the 3com solution is cheaper it is still of a good standard Cheers
ChrisH Posted March 9, 2006 Posted March 9, 2006 I have no experience of but..... I have always heard good stuff about the Cisco stuff and dont tend to hear anything about 3 Com wireless gear.
john Posted March 9, 2006 Posted March 9, 2006 I have no idea about the Cisco, but have a few 3 Com APs and they are nice APs, very stable, and seem to have an excellent range compaired to Buffalos
plexer Posted March 9, 2006 Posted March 9, 2006 AP's aside what is going to be your security setup? Ben
CyberNerd Posted March 10, 2006 Posted March 10, 2006 If we could afford Cisco we'd use them. We can't. We use 3com.
Snuffkins Posted March 10, 2006 Posted March 10, 2006 3 Com is fine unless your planning on doing electronic reg. Otherwise i'd say go for 3com, there shouldn't be any performance difference. If you are doing electronic reg though let me know cause we were one of the pilot schools and it's been so bad for us we've stopped using it... lol...
ZeroHour Posted March 10, 2006 Posted March 10, 2006 scotty, firstly good luck with wireless, we had a hellish time General rule for ya, the more secure you go the worse EVERYTHING is. 3com kit was what we had. It was a Office Connect hub which was okay but it had a issue with freezing every couple of weeks or so. Not sure about cisco stuff.
CyberNerd Posted March 10, 2006 Posted March 10, 2006 3 Com is fine unless your planning on doing electronic reg what does electronic registration have to do with it ? ethernet is TCP/IP, provided that works, so should everything else. We can do registrations ok with 3com. The main thing is that the network is consistent. I rather have the cisco cos I'm CCNA trained and their corporate propaganda rubbed off on me, but thats besides the point, 3com works well for us and is a lot cheaper.
webman Posted March 10, 2006 Posted March 10, 2006 Get a few wireless companies in, let them know what you want out of the system. Get a few recommendations and go from there. Then get them to price-match
Snuffkins Posted March 10, 2006 Posted March 10, 2006 what does electronic registration have to do with it ? . I missed out the use of handhelds. We were using palms an ipaqs for the electronic registration, but it was so unreliable using 3com equipment. After testing it with Cisco, Netgear and some company called colubris networks and it working with no problems, my assumption that the 3com access points didn't work very well for handheld devices was made... So to start over if your planning on doing e-registration "with palms or ipaqs" i'd go with the cisco. End of the day if you have the money go for Cisco. I'm CCNA trained too so my opinion is heavily weighted also, lol. I'm shocked that ethernet is TCP/IP though
CyberNerd Posted March 10, 2006 Posted March 10, 2006 I'm shocked that ethernet is TCP/IP though Wink well, it isn't. not even slightly. I know what I meant !
plexer Posted March 10, 2006 Posted March 10, 2006 I've looked at going to 3com or Procurve to move away from Buffalo WAP which as far as I am concerned are consumer grade and their pro products are over priced. If possible get some companie in and do some trials of kit, I am a big fan of wireless technology but only where it has a legitimate use and is not being used in areas that wired ethernet could be installed. Again though security is a concern if you have fixed access points and as has allready been said the more secure things are the more overhead you have and therefore you have reduced capacity. There doesn't seem to be a deinfate best secure set up as far as I can see some people use vlans etc... others WPA-PSK and others radius. I'm looking at Elektron radius server from corriente.net but at the moment it only authenticates the user and connects to the wireless once you are logged into the laptop for our usage we need the secure wireless connection to be allready established at the login screen so students log in normally the same as anywhere else. Corriente are working on machine authentication for the next release but they don't have an ETA on this yet I'm still pushing them to give me one. The best thing about Elektron is the price £130 for it inluding a years maintenance which is a 50% discount on then list price. No clients are needed as it uses the built in XP one allthough you can use others with it. Ben
eduabncs Posted March 10, 2006 Posted March 10, 2006 Hmm..well here in our offices we use Cisco Aironet's for secure wireless access. And it works a treat and I have been told by our wireless techie bod that the implemetation we are using is about as secure as it gets. The basic setup we use is similar to the setup suggested from the Cisco site here. You pays your money.......!
plexer Posted March 10, 2006 Posted March 10, 2006 Yup and that's exactly the same security that Elektron gives you. Ben
E1uSiV3 Posted March 11, 2006 Posted March 11, 2006 I put a Cisco Aironet AP1231 setup in at the old place, worked really well and security wise they are very good (set up RADIUS auth, WPA etc)
deanc Posted March 12, 2006 Posted March 12, 2006 Please promise not to laugh!! we have a full site wireless network which was installed when the school bought into bromcom and they sold us Samsung access points, these are actually quite reliable and we dont have that much trouble with them(too my knowledge weve only had one go wrong but as they are under the service agreement who care) Now you did promise not to laugh didnt you in the recent new buildings we have DLink, they seem ok apart from one that went wrong the other day and the fact that the management software occasionally looses sight of them and regularly crashes it might also be worth looking into HP, all our switches are and they never cause a problem
plexer Posted March 12, 2006 Posted March 12, 2006 Dean nothing to laugh about mate as far as I can see as long as the kit works thats the main thing not everyone has the funds to be able to purchase high end kit. Ben
scotty Posted March 13, 2006 Author Posted March 13, 2006 Thanks for your advice and experiences guys I am venturing towards the Cisco kit, we do have the budget for it so I suppose it's better to get the best kit for that money. Just to confirm the security we will be putting in place will be WPA auth and Radius Cheers
E1uSiV3 Posted March 13, 2006 Posted March 13, 2006 btw have you looked into what client cards you will be using too scotty? the APs are only half the wireless network so i would look at what cards you are using to make sure they will do what you want them to do, and as a side note, the Intel 2200BG intenal wifi cards support cisco aironet extensions (or appears to at least) which is a bonus, other cards may or may not. also, if you have any B cards you need to get them replaced for WPA to work.
plexer Posted March 13, 2006 Posted March 13, 2006 I can't recommend 2200BG cards to you though a quick google will show you how many issues people have had with them us included. Ben
Mikey Posted March 17, 2006 Posted March 17, 2006 I've got laptops with 2200BG Int wireless on them, and they seem to connect to the network (using WEP) fine - they've actually been the most impressive internal wireless we've had. Usually I have to buy Cisco Aironet PCMCIA cards - this is the first time I've got away with it!
eduabncs Posted March 17, 2006 Posted March 17, 2006 I've got laptops with 2200BG Int wireless on them, and they seem to connect to the network (using WEP) fine - they've actually been the most impressive internal wireless we've had. Usually I have to buy Cisco Aironet PCMCIA cards - this is the first time I've got away with it! The reason why is Cisco & Intel are working closely to make their products work together. See here
Nij.UK Posted May 9, 2006 Posted May 9, 2006 We started with 3COM, but had loads of problems with them, which lead to having to update the firmware, but this didnt really solve the problem, and the range was very more on these access points. I moved over to Cisco and got rid of all the 3COM equipment and they are working like a dream, we only have the basic 1121 series Aironet AP's but they do the job with a good range on them, very stable and quick
Ric_ Posted May 9, 2006 Posted May 9, 2006 I looked into this at depth. I was going site-wide wireless so wanted something centralised and needed the ability to use VLANs and QOS plus be super-secure. My findings: * Cisco looked good but was NOT cheap * 3COM license their technology off somebody else (possible future repercusions?) and I heard of a few problems with their setups * HP have a very limited choice of products and are lacking in features * Ariba sounded good but I couldn't find out too much * Bluesocket was good quality and worked out quite cheap since they sell 'bundle packs' (this is what I went for)
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