Sonic007 Posted March 8, 2022 Posted March 8, 2022 (edited) Unifi AC Pro's accross both of our sites. No complaints, work briliantly. Controller software has tonnes of settings too. Great stuff. We used to have a Meraki setup. Never again. Too many problems and licensing cost a fortune! Edited March 8, 2022 by Sonic007
leegcvcc Posted June 20, 2022 Posted June 20, 2022 Just bringing this up again for my own benefit We use a 75 AP mix of AP121 and AP230 APs from Aerohive and have done for 7-8 years now and now looking to renew/replace. Been really solid and never had to do much at all since implementation bar adding some VLANs and SSIDs. Staff laptops x 130 use NPS and Radius to connect and are farmed off to various VLANs based on Smoothwall elevated access requirements for certain users. Works really well bar a bit complex maybe, but rock solid. Post 16 only wifi users x 50 have their own PPSK key for their devices. Bit of an overhead, but can control traffic and trace stuff well this way. Guest access is a bit of a pain for users with SSL inspection and the need to install our Certs. we have 1k students and 150 staff roughly, and smartphones are banned in school, so lower school have no need for wireless. It seems Aruba is quite limited in terms of configuration features compared to Extreme/Aerohive. Just wondering with the solutions recommended, how does the solutions actually work? Appreciate all school sizes are different and some will work better than others with larger or smaller deployments. Sorry to hijack the thread, but it is kind of connected
MartinT Posted June 20, 2022 Posted June 20, 2022 Ruckus running Wi-Fi 6 with 104 APs. Working very well and handles 300 staff and 1300 students without any problems.
chazzy2501 Posted June 20, 2022 Posted June 20, 2022 Unifi and some Meraki, if I had an unlimited budget then it'd be all Meraki but I don't know how anyone could justify the cost.
CHiLL Posted June 20, 2022 Posted June 20, 2022 Ruckus ZoneDirector 1200 with Ruckus 500 Wi-Fi 5 APs, installed in 2015. The ZD died earlier this year and we replaced it under warranty. The system as a whole has been very good.
TheRobins Posted June 20, 2022 Posted June 20, 2022 Ruckus using Unleashed with 35 AP's, mainly R750's. Excellent Wifi6 performance, 500 students and 60 staff. Fit and forget to be fair. I would suggest looking at the controller option maybe for some of your more complex VLAN handing. Unleashed does everything I need it to do personally. Fitted around 8 months ago and really pleased with it.
MartinT Posted June 20, 2022 Posted June 20, 2022 I forgot to mention that we use the Ruckus Virtual SmartZone (vSZ) controller running in VMware.
Asgard Posted June 21, 2022 Posted June 21, 2022 (edited) Two sites running Extreme ClouidIQ. About 120 APs between them. We migrated both of them from Extreme Wing over the summer when our lease was up ( we use Extreme’s Enterprise Network Sub to lease both of them), when I say up… they contacted us and said it would be cheaper to end the lease start a new one with all 11ax kit! And it was !! Prior to the lease (first lease started July 18) we migrated the main site from Ruckus which we had been running from 2009 The second site was part of a different trust and when they joined us they migrated from Meru to WiNG now to ClouidIQ I’d always been a huge supporter of Ruckus having ran it since late 2009, but in my opinion ClouidIQ is special Edited June 21, 2022 by Asgard 1
robslack Posted June 21, 2022 Posted June 21, 2022 We have Meraki here, upgraded from Xirrus system and support calls for WiFi issues dropped 80%!!!
simpsonj Posted June 21, 2022 Posted June 21, 2022 Just bringing this up again for my own benefit We use a 75 AP mix of AP121 and AP230 APs from Aerohive and have done for 7-8 years now and now looking to renew/replace. Been really solid and never had to do much at all since implementation bar adding some VLANs and SSIDs. Staff laptops x 130 use NPS and Radius to connect and are farmed off to various VLANs based on Smoothwall elevated access requirements for certain users. Works really well bar a bit complex maybe, but rock solid. Post 16 only wifi users x 50 have their own PPSK key for their devices. Bit of an overhead, but can control traffic and trace stuff well this way. Guest access is a bit of a pain for users with SSL inspection and the need to install our Certs. we have 1k students and 150 staff roughly, and smartphones are banned in school, so lower school have no need for wireless. It seems Aruba is quite limited in terms of configuration features compared to Extreme/Aerohive. Just wondering with the solutions recommended, how does the solutions actually work? Appreciate all school sizes are different and some will work better than others with larger or smaller deployments. Sorry to hijack the thread, but it is kind of connected I moved from Aerohive to Meraki and I think the systems are pretty comparable in terms of configuration and setup. I would argue that Meraki is simpler to use, easier to get traffic information and do something about it with group policies. However, I don't believe Meraki can generate the PPSK keys in the same way that Aerohive can, so you'll need to change how your Post-16 connects (most likely setup a self sign in portal) and you can redirect Guests to a webpage with your certs on as required.
ITGURU Posted June 22, 2022 Posted June 22, 2022 D-Link with controller or Ubiquiti Unifi at our sites. Set it and forget it never any issues and one off costs, no subscriptions required.
3s-gtech Posted June 22, 2022 Posted June 22, 2022 We’re on the mk2 (mk1 was 802.11n) version of our externally managed Cisco system. Now ax APs, with 300Mbps uplinks - they’ve been really impressive and wireless laptop suites actually work.
SDF_85 Posted June 23, 2022 Posted June 23, 2022 Haven't had any issues with Unifi here. Running 120 access points.
Noxid_w Posted June 23, 2022 Posted June 23, 2022 I pushed out x28 Unifi Ac HDs in the last 2 years. i can't complain really, but I really don't trust Unifi anymore. Their supply issues is one thing, but we just never know what they are going to do. I'm currently looking into Omada as a future cheaper alternaive, or maybe just bite the bullet and go for something like Aruba.
SDF_85 Posted June 23, 2022 Posted June 23, 2022 Yes I can understand people's apprehension about Unifi, in the past you would wonder what they have broken or changed after every upgrade. In my experience in recent times they seem to have improved on that front, but maybe I've just been lucky!
PowerShellWolf Posted June 23, 2022 Posted June 23, 2022 We have 52 Unifi Pro APs, Originally we planned on HP Aruba but it was too darn expensive when you consider you need to pay a yearly license. Unifi how ever is amazing and you can host your own controller and there are no extra fees. Plus the range of devices you can get means that you can cover almost any weird need you have.
houlta Posted June 23, 2022 Posted June 23, 2022 Just done an Aruba Campus 802.11ax rollout myself with cloud management. I have to say the AP-515's are the bees knees, however they cost an arm and a leg and thats assuming you can get hold of them. Glad to see the back of the old meru setup though! I'm looking at TP-Link Omada WiFi6 range for primaries as a 'cheap' solution EAP-660 perhaps. Even the PoE switches are affordable imho.
PMFR Posted June 23, 2022 Posted June 23, 2022 We've been with Ruckus for over 8 years now and are looking to upgrade our infrastructure. We're happy with their service but would like to know what other wireless solutions are being used in educational environments. We have around 40 APs supporting 250+ clients. Thanks! We used Meraki for some time and recently moved to Zyxel. Awesome kit - very fast, easy to manage, good price, and cloud console license ("Nebula") comes built in for most of the features you would need to manage. Highly recommend (we even moved our switching to Zyxel).
bald_pig Posted June 23, 2022 Posted June 23, 2022 Yes I can understand people's apprehension about Unifi, in the past you would wonder what they have broken or changed after every upgrade. In my experience in recent times they seem to have improved on that front, but maybe I've just been lucky! These days they just slurp your data without your consent and don't let you disable it...
mavhc Posted June 23, 2022 Posted June 23, 2022 How much are you paying per AP over, say, 10 years? Cambium have free cloud controller.
XiJ Posted June 26, 2022 Posted June 26, 2022 Unifi here. We have dozens of schools using help, dozens more at consumer level and dozens more at SMB level. They are solid. The only time I had an issue with an i grade was two school with the dhcp issue a while ago. Since solved and updated several times again without issue. Compare to Ms updates id say unifi are rock solid too lol The only issue now is supply (which now seems to be switches rather than APs). All though the PoE models seem to be coming back.
DavR Posted June 28, 2022 Posted June 28, 2022 Just bringing this up again for my own benefit We use a 75 AP mix of AP121 and AP230 APs from Aerohive and have done for 7-8 years now and now looking to renew/replace. Been really solid and never had to do much at all since implementation bar adding some VLANs and SSIDs. Staff laptops x 130 use NPS and Radius to connect and are farmed off to various VLANs based on Smoothwall elevated access requirements for certain users. Works really well bar a bit complex maybe, but rock solid. Post 16 only wifi users x 50 have their own PPSK key for their devices. Bit of an overhead, but can control traffic and trace stuff well this way. Guest access is a bit of a pain for users with SSL inspection and the need to install our Certs. we have 1k students and 150 staff roughly, and smartphones are banned in school, so lower school have no need for wireless. It seems Aruba is quite limited in terms of configuration features compared to Extreme/Aerohive. Just wondering with the solutions recommended, how does the solutions actually work? Appreciate all school sizes are different and some will work better than others with larger or smaller deployments. Sorry to hijack the thread, but it is kind of connected Funnily enough, I went out to quote to replace our 6 year old Extreme/Aerohive solution this term. In the end, one supplier suggested that actually, for our fairly basic needs, we could probably just renew licensing for another three years, and add a few extra devices to plug the gaps, so I went with that. We're AP130s across the board, so we're AC but not WiFi6, and we've just bought some Atoms (mini APs) to plug the gaps. Time will only tell whether that was a good decision or not. I think we'll manage.
nathan3388 Posted June 28, 2022 Posted June 28, 2022 We is ruckus and have for years we use r610, r650 due to the network ports have 2.5g connection and Wi-Fi ax on as well so will see us through and few years before upgrading
colacao82 Posted July 11, 2022 Posted July 11, 2022 We're mainly an Extreme (Aerohive) trust. Really easy to set up and manage, never had an issue. We're using it in a couple of secondary schools 1200+ students and a primary. I'm also managing some of my other branded switches (HP, Dell and Cisco) that I've inherited with the same Extreme Cloud IQ dashboard. It's really slick. I can back up my switches running config with a few clicks and even created network maps with real-time VLAN mapping. Went out to test the market last year and Extreme was cheaper than Meraki and Ruckus by quite a bit. They were a little bit cheaper than Aruba.
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