Mustang Posted June 25, 2012 Posted June 25, 2012 Hi everyone i have found your site after a bit of googling round for information on wireless vendors. I have already read a number of topics, which were very useful I am currently looking at replacing our Wireless Lan with another vendor and upgrading to N. We have spoken to a few vendors and sales people but depending on who you speak to cost difference is immense and i think because we are in education they think we can afford anything. I know this is really cheeky but could any of you guys let me know how much you paid for your wireless upgrade in the past year and what kit you had, as i think we are getting taken for a ride. If you don't want to post on the thread thats fine but you are more than welcome to inbox me Thanks Mustang
twin--turbo Posted June 25, 2012 Posted June 25, 2012 Think our Meru was ~£50K for a large Modern build with ~60 AP's TT
Millgate Posted June 25, 2012 Posted June 25, 2012 Obviously it varies massively per school but it's worth looking at Meru and Netgear as well as he obvious Cisco. Netgear will be cheaper and it is still really good! If you need any quotes, wireless surveys etc, feel free to get in touch Luke
Mustang Posted June 25, 2012 Author Posted June 25, 2012 We are looking at about 75 to 90 AP's from AeroHive Aruba Cisco Extricom HP Merkai Ruckus Xirrus We have also been told around the 50K mark but i think this seems really expensive
Millgate Posted June 25, 2012 Posted June 25, 2012 Well with the Cisco & HP, don't forget you can "bid" them both and the price drops dramatically. Just make sure your reseller knows what they're doing and plays them off against each other
twin--turbo Posted June 25, 2012 Posted June 25, 2012 We had Cisco , was good but the 1131's did not support N.. A number of peeps have had success with the Ubiquiti Unifi. I have used Ubiquiti stuff elsewhere and it's reasonable kit. Building design, and client numbers plays a big part in the solution. Rob
Millgate Posted June 25, 2012 Posted June 25, 2012 Very true. It's worth getting someone to do a wireless survey first. Some vendors charge for the survey but I know Netgear offer a free one and then you can give their result to the rest. Not ideal, but it saves money
Soulfish Posted June 25, 2012 Posted June 25, 2012 We are looking at about 75 to 90 AP's from AeroHive Aruba Cisco Extricom HP Merkai Ruckus Xirrus We have also been told around the 50K mark but i think this seems really expensive 50k seems about right to be honest. Remember this is enterprise level kit your buying. If you were buying a load of Cisco 3750's, Juniper EX3200/4200 or HP 2910's you'd expect to be paying a fair whack - this really isn't that much different
glennda Posted June 25, 2012 Posted June 25, 2012 I've been doing working with Meraki Recently and the cloud controller is very powerful and customizable - more powerful then a lot of other makes I've used like HP, Cisco and Aerohive.
Roberto Posted June 25, 2012 Posted June 25, 2012 Keep in mind with the enterprise kit, you're not just buying a bunch of access points - you're buying a bunch of intelligently managed access points, with a central controller to do the managing. This should greatly reduce APs interfering with each other, improve load balancing, handing of roaming clients from one AP to another, make it much easier to secure and manage your wireless infrastructure... all kinds of stuff. This is what costs the money, and if you have the money and the requirement for this sort of managed environment then its money well spent. I can't discuss what we paid for our Aruba deployment, but it was significant and it was money very well spent imho.
glennda Posted June 25, 2012 Posted June 25, 2012 One thing to mention about the meraki kit - with it being a cloud controller it means you need to have certain ports allowed outbound. So if you are part of an RBC they may block these ports. (its so each AP can talk to the controller in the cloud).
m25man Posted June 25, 2012 Posted June 25, 2012 Unifi - Just does what it says on the box. I just covered our training facility with 9 APs + 1 external with a 120 deg sector to cover a sports field. 4 SSIDs on 4 VLans guest portal cost less than £1000 Unfortunately, to get the Ethernet connectivity to the previously uncabled areas needed a Fiber Run and 24 Ethernet drops which cost £4k So the actual cost of your wireless deployment will depend on the state of the underlying infrastructure and it's ability to support it, so £50k could be quite cheap in some scenarios! 75 UAP-Pros as a comparison will cost around £13k plus what ever the installer wants to put them in if you can't do it yourself. Most people choosing Unifi do so on cost and therefore self install to save money. Other vendors leverage specific customisations of the 802.11 standards in order to make their products appear to have specialist features that we all "must have", most of which are probably not needed in the average school. For those whose schools IT budget is not as large as RBS/NatWest (and look what that bought them) it has to be looked at, if you have specific requirements that need advanced feature sets such as single channel blankets, beam forming and band steering etc then any of the many vendors that feature here have a product that will do the job. There is no one size fits all in the wireless world, although Cisco would probably argue that point... 1
psydii Posted June 26, 2012 Posted June 26, 2012 RBS/Natwests issue will stem from the cost cutting that they've done recently. Pay peanuts get monkeys when it comes to mission critical systems. The execption here appears to be Ubiquiti which must have cut some corners to hit that price point - but whether those are evident or even of concern would be for you to evaluate against the alternatives. I note that every time a vendor/reseller cold calls me about a new wireless network as soon as I say 'Meru' they back off and the conversation is over. Their reputation is fierce.
Ben_Stanton Posted June 26, 2012 Posted June 26, 2012 I'm literally gathering quotes today. I'm really liking the Meraki kit so will probably go down that route (there are pros and cons to them all I guess). We are a fairly small school (200 students) and are only looking at about 20 AP's. However, this is all part of a bigger plan to arm all kids with an iPad. We need this project to be scalable and manageable. The Meraki kit seems to tick all the boxes so far - and is reasonably priced (in my mind anyway). So far, I have received quotes ranging from £12k to £15k. That is based on 20 AP's on a 3-year license agreement.
localzuk Posted June 26, 2012 Posted June 26, 2012 We are looking at about 75 to 90 AP's from AeroHive Aruba Cisco Extricom HP Merkai Ruckus Xirrus We have also been told around the 50K mark but i think this seems really expensive £50k sounds about right for 90 APs, plus controllers. You'll then need any cabling putting in to hang it all off. Me? I'd be looking at Ruckus, Meraki and Aruba. Not had any experience of the rest - except hearing so nightmares about Extricom and Xirrus. We run Cisco here (inherited when I arrived), and it works but it is not the simplest system to manage.
old_n07 Posted June 26, 2012 Posted June 26, 2012 (edited) Weare basically doing the same thing, ditching a HP network and getting test kit in from all the suppliers above over the next few weeks. From the meetings we have had so far the Aerohive kit impressed us the most but we'll see what happens when we test the AP's provided. We are looking at 100 to 120 AP's and the prices you are talking about seem about right for 90 or so. Strangely enough the Meru rep cancelled on us today apparently he didn't want to come in and sell us the solution Edited June 26, 2012 by old_n07
Mustang Posted July 11, 2012 Author Posted July 11, 2012 Well Ruckus so far have managed to price themselves out of the running by being double the cost of everyone else
RTFM Posted July 12, 2012 Posted July 12, 2012 Ruckus was cheaper than Meru when we were getting quotes, Siracom were also a pain in the arse to get demo kit from in the way we wanted, when we wanted it (sorry @Millgate ). If you want something scaleable that will last, dont bother looking at Netgear. We just purchased a Ruckus system with 33 AP's and a 3000 series ZD, 3 years reseller support on the ZD and 3 year software support on the WAP's, installation and configuration for under £20k. This system is hugely scalable in the future and will give us 100% site coverage. Am happy to put you in touch with who we purchased from if you are interested in getting some alternative quotes, just drop me a message
RTFM Posted July 12, 2012 Posted July 12, 2012 @RTFM what Ruckus AP's did you go for?? Hi @Mustang, AP is the ZF 7363 and the ZD is the ZD3050
Dragon Posted July 13, 2012 Posted July 13, 2012 Speak to Mark or Aggy at Net-Ctrl. I am surprised you found Ruckus more expensive, it was cheaper than Meru and HP for me. 1
teejay Posted July 13, 2012 Posted July 13, 2012 One thing I would say is that you probably wouldn't need anywhere near 75-80 AP's with the Ruckus kit. We are a large site and our survey showed we only needed 28, although due to finances we could only buy 7 to cover main areas and we actually find those 7 cover about 70% of the school!
bladedanny Posted July 13, 2012 Posted July 13, 2012 We got our Ruckus from @CPLTD it's dead easy to set up and Chris and Mark from CP were great price wise. 1
Wes Posted July 19, 2012 Posted July 19, 2012 I've been doing working with Meraki Recently and the cloud controller is very powerful and customizable - more powerful then a lot of other makes I've used like HP, Cisco and Aerohive. This can't be said of Aerohive as they do not have a controller, they use a shared set protocols to distribute data and control planes across the APs at the egde of the network. The access points each have a processor which is more than adequate to deal with anything the AP chooses to demand of it. Essentially with any shared control plane (i.e. a controller, cloud or otherwise) you're diluting a pre-determined amount of processing power which is dependent on processing data sent to it in this case via an internet connection rather than having a dedicated processor on each AP, dealing with data processing and forwarding at the edge of the network. HiveManager is available as either a VM or cloud service and plays no part in the data processing. It's a pure management tool and in my opinion offers many more useful tools than the Meraki's, fairly limited, features. The most useful being the Client Health Monitor (instant look up of all clients WiFi, network and application health), Teacherview (built in classroom control software) and the stateful firewall built into every access point which can be leveraged in to allow or deny access to private or public addresses as required for each user group without or tied into wired network VLANs.
Wes Posted July 19, 2012 Posted July 19, 2012 One thing I would say is that you probably wouldn't need anywhere near 75-80 AP's with the Ruckus kit. We are a large site and our survey showed we only needed 28, although due to finances we could only buy 7 to cover main areas and we actually find those 7 cover about 70% of the school! Coverage is the easy part - having the capacity to connect large numbers of users with a decent throughput is another challenge. Coverage wise, all APs are limited by law on their power output, physics being the other limiting factor for coverage. I would suggest this many APs have been reccomended as the school has a capacity requirement rather than purely looking for coverage? If this is the case a lot of times you will need an AP per classroom to connect 30-35 concurrent users with a decent throughput for each. The best WLANs will have automated load balancing and band steering as well as some sort of airtime fairness technique in use (such as Aerohive's Dynamic Airtime Scheduling) to ensure that high capacity WLANs are optimized towards actual user experience.
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