Wireless Costs

[glennda]

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.

 

In the classroom environment from what I have seen of Aerohive the classroom control software is something Meraki don't have granted. When I mentioned controller I meant the management features overall as I know Aerohive doesn't have a controller - its chalk and cheese at the end of the day!

[rbance]

I would look at Xirrus....for a start you will not 75 APs for this solution (I will take a guess and say 25)...get a survey from them to find out... Xirrus will do it for free and guarantee the coverage based on these results...

I know the others are reluctant to provide a free survey..but my view is they need to (remember that yes you are one school.....but you have many contacts with other schools and potential customers for them.)

Xirrus pricing is about $3900 AUD for the XR 2430 AUD and $1600 for the XR1230 AUD. These have dual band and can serve 240 (4 radios) to 120 (2 radios) respectively (although Xirrus will tell you more).

 

Also, you will need to look at your core network and edge switches to make sure they are capable of handling the overall throughput placed on them from addtional devices (not just wireless).

 

 

I would challenge the comment about nightmares with Xirrus.....but oh well.....

 

From my experience the nightmares occur when you have not properly designed all aspects of the solution first (core and edge redesign as well).....and not doing a survey to get an idea of actual coverage and potential blackspots is a fatal flaw here.......

[Max_Power]

We have Juniper - Looking at finance records the total including all the cabling costs and support was around £35K - £40K for 60 access points. Not the most friendly interface but I inherited the system. It does the job though.