DanRob

If your intended use case is pretty basic then Promethean have hinted at a new product to be released in summer of this year that promises to remove a lot of the complexity and therefore significantly lower the price. May be worth you speaking to your reseller to see what they're able to tell you before finalising a decision.

Agree with the above, however you should note that Promethean have released the ActivPanel v9 & v9 Premium to replace the AP7 recently which may change your comparison somewhat. I don't believe the v9 is available in 70" either which may or may not affect your decision.

We're a Silicon Alley school too, there's no argument that they've got this whole process down to a T. They'll supply boxes for empties and organise free, scheduled collections too. We have however had some quality concerns over the recent year which can cause work, but I suspect this could be an issue elsewhere also. Prices aren't as cheap as can be sourced alternatively, but the premium may be worth it for the ease of use.

Another vote here for United Carlton based at Team Valley. We've found them competitive on price, but most importantly, quotation, installation and service is pretty trouble free. Our reprographics officer also speaks highly, which hasn't always been the case with other companies such as Xerox & Sharp.

It most certainly is an ongoing cost, I simply wanted to communicate that there's deals to be had with Meraki and that (imo of course) the future proofing offered is probably close to unbeatable. Some people value the certainty, and the way we purchased we're certain that we don't need to re-asses our WiFi provision for the next 10+ years. Not many solutions offer that.

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that Meraki licensing worked out beneficial for us overall. We're a MAT and purchased for all schools (where cloud based comes into it's own, allowing cross-site roaming etc), negotiated an '11 for the price of 5 years' deal and paid up front. We are therefore GUARANTEED updates, maintenance & support and hardware replacement for 11 years. No other wireless setup we looked at could come close to that level of promise. We previously paid handsomely for Meru kit and 5 years later needed to purchase a new controller, with which our AP320i APs only worked for a further year, essentially leaving us with no room to move; any further firmware updates to our controller would result in needing to purchase new APs, which was cost prohibitive. Risk of this happening with Meraki is 0, any AP revisions are guaranteed to work with their cloud based model; if we have an AP fail in 10 years time they'll send us a working replacement FOC. I can't speak for Ruckus or Unifi, but Meraki worked out well for us, so much so that a few of our sites now use Meraki switching too. It's an interesting concept for management and one that appears to work. I also don't recall it being *THAT* much more expensive than the alternatives we considered when the yearly costs were broken down.