Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN Reviews

We have been using the latest versions of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN because we were deploying them in a new restaurant, we had all new solutions. The only difference was that because of COVID everyone has devices on backorder and we had to compare different Meraki devices. We had to redesign our plans based on what was in stock in the wholesaler inventory. They were all enterprise-level Meraki devices.

The deployment is on-premise but we manage the solution from the cloud.

The owner of the restaurant where Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN was implemented wanted to receive very detailed analytics and metrics based on the customer traffic that he would have. We wanted to capture the information from the customers either walking outside of the restaurant or enjoying the food inside, then adjust his marketing accordingly.

Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN has improved our organization by providing us with a sense of security. When anyone is connected wirelessly, you're not going to get compromised. You're not going to receive a bunch of pop-up ads, and the beneficial functionality of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN has been great. It has strong encryption and since my customer has a fast internet speed, they have good wireless speed.  The owner was extremely happy with the solution, not only the functionality, the daily use, but the analytics and metrics that he wanted were available.

The settings of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN can be very granular. You can lock down and block devices with the controls. For example, we have four different wireless settings, such as guest, employee, security, and backup. For example, the settings for the employees, if they use laptops, they're required to have certain settings, such as an antivirus installed. If they do not then Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN will not let them connect. This is very good protection because the network works on the bringing your own device(BYOD) principle. It's a BYOD environment now, and you also don't want them to bring infection into the environment because these people are connecting to the LAN via wireless connections. We have to be careful because we're managing it, we have to be very strict with regards to the rules and policies.

The way Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN groups certain things, as far as the devices for either monitoring and or configuring them should be done better. They should be grouped a little bit differently because if I want to configure something, a different setting on an SSID, I have to go to their specific area where I would have thought it should be clumped as a dropdown menu in another area.

It would be a benefit for Cisco to make an application for mobile devices. For example, an Apple or Android application for either a smartphone or a tablet. It would be useful to log in and use the dashboards to have a central control panel. It could be used to allow alerts to be received quickly if they went to mobiles devices. 10 times out of 10, you will have access to your phone before you have any other device on you. For example, one of the managed services that I use is Continuum which was purchased by ConnectWise making it a ConnectWise solution. They have an application for alerts that I can click on, and it will open the application on my phone. I can go in and see the alerts and trouble tickets and receive information, such as which client it is, which computer, server, or laptop. At that point, I can either click on another link and remote into it, or I can call the customer and notify them of the alert and that they could experience some delay or lag or problem with the internet connection because of their network card on their laptop. I do not have time to sit in front of the dashboard and if the alerts could be managed from a mobile device that would be a big help. 

You could spend all day looking at the bandwidth, or who is potentially looking at what in the network. Once you know what to lock down from the users, such as social media sites. If you have the employees on a separate wireless network, you can lock down all social media, to where they have no access to the social media. Additionally, you can block eBay, or anywhere you can purchase from, no porn, no adult content, it works very well wirelessly. It is a good solution.

I am not the first to think about additional features or improvements. They most likely have a lot of features in the works. Since I have many clients now I'll subscript to their next newsletter that they put out. They may have a mobile application coming out in the near future.

I have used Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for approximately 10 years.

I have not had any issues with the stability of the Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN. I am extremely satisfied with its performance and quality.

The stability of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN has been great. I am highly satisfied.

I have contacted the support from Cisco. Recently I couldn't find where to do something on one of the main Cisco switches. It was a PoE switch, and I sent an email out to the support at approximately 10:00 and I received an email response early morning hours at approximately 5:00. I was very happy. They asked me a couple of questions, and then when I tried what they'd suggested that I should try, it worked. It was only one little setting that I missed, that I didn't check, and everything came up fine. Then I replied to the email, and they closed the ticket.

I'm very happy with their support. Additionally, they said in the email, if I have a critical issue that needs a more immediate response we can call a number to receive immediate support. I thought this was great. We are an enterprise client of Cisco because the solutions that we have purchased allow us this extra immediate service. 

The initial setup of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN was straightforward. You create the network, you add in the license, it pulls in all the devices, then you only need to rename the devices to whatever you want. What I enjoy are the ones I always request or require is a floor plan from the architect. I upload the floor plan, and I place it on the map, similar to a Google map. I place where all the devices are located within that floor plan on the map, and I provide that as documentation to the clients and they love it.

I would rate Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN implementation a five out of five.

We do the implementation, maintenance, and support of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN. You set the solution up and it runs, it is pretty simple to manage. 

We are very particular with email alerts when we receive them. When we receive the alerts, we will let the client know that on a particular evening or morning during the weekday or weekend, or early morning hours, we will be sending a firmware update or an update for the software. We do it in a way that does not affect them.

If everyone were to see all the features, utilities, and tools that can be used and the reporting that Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN can provide, I think they would be able to better justify the cost. Although, it's still a little bit on the pricey side, and for me to explain everything in plain English to a non-tech person would take a while. 

It would take me upwards of an hour because I would be a very big cheerleader for this solution. I'm an extreme fanatic about Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN. That's why I wanted to show them the comparison between the Ubiquiti and the Ruckus solutions next to Cisco, and the biggest hesitation is the price of the solution, which includes the licensing, and renewal. Otherwise, Ubiquiti would win, but the problem with Ubiquiti is, they don't have the granular type of customization of reporting that the owner of the restaurant wanted.  I'm sure that once he gets started and he gets people in there, he is going to see that it is worth it. 

He won't have a problem with it moving forward, but the price was a tough sell. We thought at first we weren't going to get it. We used a report from PeerSpot for two clients to compare solutions. One of the two we did receive as a client and the other one we did not. I feel that the client that we did not sell Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN to will come back to us because they were focused on purchasing a cheap solution. However, as they say, you get what you pay for. They might be calling us back in a month to potentially change solutions.

The customer we implemented Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for found the reporting invaluable, and it paid for the cost of the implementation of the wireless devices.

My client has made comments on the price, indicating it is expensive, however you do receive a lot for the money that you did spend on the solution. The price of the annual renewal of the licensing of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is a little high. We wish the price would drop.

I have looked at our parts and labor sheet, for a three-year license for three access points and the A port PoE switch, will cost approximately $1,200. It is approximately $400 a year for licensing for Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN.

In the beginning, I had to find and figure out where to find certain functions. The logistics of where things are configured or located in the dashboard can be difficult to find, it could be more intuitive. It's not a perfect solution. However, if money weren't an object, I would suggest that everyone should use a Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN solution.

My advice to those that have not used a Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN, I would recommend them to check the community forums that are available and ask questions there. They're very helpful. There are several YouTube videos that can be used to receive a good overview. They do provide useful documentation with the solution, but they tell you to go online to this specific link and it'll explain in great details step by step what you have to do. 

There are consultants, such as myself, that have YouTube channels. They show you step by step how to set up your first network from start to finish, what to change, what settings to use, what not to use, and depending on the scenario, what changes you need to make, how to use the dashboard, how to add licenses to assigned products. How to create a splash page for a guest login and if you want them to click through, and after redirect them to that client's website before they click on and connect to the internet and go someplace else. There are a lot of other outside non-Cisco vendors and consultants that put a lot of information out there. I've always told people, Google and YouTube are your best friends.

I grew up where, to find something, you would have to physically go to the library, and you had to go through the Rolodex card catalog file to find a book. The process would take a couple of hours, with the technology today the process now can take a couple of seconds, and you can download a digital copy of the book and read it on your Kindle, iPad, or whatever device you choose. 

Cisco is very picky about their solutions, they strive for accuracy and non-buggy software. I commend them for that, and there's a price to pay for research and design.

I rate Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN a ten out of ten.

Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN facilitates daily operations by providing reliable connectivity for devices like PCs and machinery. It allows customers to access the Internet and essential applications without needing Ethernet cables.

The platform's most valuable feature is the ability to detect network issues through a dashboard.

The product's interface should be user-friendly. The integration options with third-party applications need enhancement.

I have worked with Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for the past 2 years.

The product is super stable. I would rate the stability a ten.

We work with many customers using Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN, with deployments ranging from small offices to large enterprises. It is sometimes deployed in principal offices, catering to a user base of 15 to 20 individuals. Additionally, there are instances where larger-scale deployments are undertaken, accommodating up to a hundred users.

I rate the platform's scalability an eight out of ten.

Whenever we raise the ticket, we receive prompt assistance from the technical support team.

Positive

The product operates on its cloud platform, but some customers use AWS for certain functionalities. Deployment time varies depending on the scale of the project. It involves setting up wireless access points, configuring IP addresses, and connecting them to the network. Additional configurations are then pushed through the dashboard. It takes approximately a day to complete.

I would rate the initial setup process a ten out of ten.

I would rate the pricing of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN as a five. It could be more affordable than other solutions like Aruba.

Customers appreciate the ease of network management provided by Cisco Meraki's centralized dashboard, simplifying operations.

The cloud-based management has made a significant difference in the IT environment of our customers. It enables seamless access and connection to the dashboard, allowing them to troubleshoot network issues promptly. Customers no longer need to connect to the on-premises infrastructure or use specialized tools; instead, they can easily access and manage their network via the dashboard of any device with an internet connection.

It offers built-in security features like firewalls. We have purchased additional licenses for features such as SD-WAN technology.

Before installing it, the users should consider space requirements, network topology, and compatibility with existing IT infrastructure.

I would rate it a nine.

My customer wanted to configure the solution as Wi-Fi instead of a firewall service.

Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is a user-friendly solution that has good performance and stability.

The solution's pricing could be improved.

I have been using Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for two years.

I don't recall facing any bugs with Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN, but the patches are done remotely.

Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is a scalable solution.

It was easy to deploy the solution. We had some help from the support team, making it easier to deploy the solution.

I read the document for a day and deployed it the next day.

Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is an expensive solution.

Users with a big budget should go with Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN. Customers with a low budget can choose Meraki Go, which is less costly than Cisco Meraki and does not require any license.

Cisco Meraki has physical boxes for centralized cloud management. If we are talking about a dashboard, we can configure location-wise, which will be called a network. In an organization, for each location, we can create a new network where it will be managed centrally. I would recommend the solution to other users.

Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN alone does not give security. In every company, the front-end will be firewalls, which will take care of the compliance part.

Overall, I rate Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN a nine out of ten.

The product's cloud controller is easy to use. 

The product's features for network analysis need improvement. It lags a bit in providing reports for Wi-Fi performance. Additionally, they should offer a higher-end firewall.

We have been using Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for more than seven years.

I rate Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN's stability a seven out of ten.

We have 800 Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN users in our organization. I rate its scalability an eight out of ten.

We have used Cisco Aironet and Ruckus products before. Later, we switched to Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN as we wanted more control of remote office administration. We are a small company that administers switches, configuration, and backup remotely. In comparison, the traditional Cisco switches need upgrading firmware.

I rate the initial setup process an eight out of ten. It takes 30 minutes to configure it and around two hours to complete the installation. We connect the switch to the LAN, which is already connected to the Internet. Once the device is seen on the Meraki portal, we configure it from there.

The product generates a return on investment for us.

Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is expensive. I rate its pricing an eight out of ten.

I rate Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN a seven out of ten. I advise others to configure the product and then utilize the plug-and-play functionality.

It has limitations for pricing and supply of material. It takes around four months to be delivered. It is very time-consuming.

My company deals with Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN since it provides better visibility, from my point of view, making it easier to manage. With Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN, you don't need to create something else to create controllers. You can just enter in your internet browser to deploy and manage it from there. L7 firewall is also a very good sync option available with Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the simplicity of operating it, which is its biggest asset. The product also has similar, if not better, capabilities than traditional wireless access points.

As a daily user of the solution, I haven't found anything that needs improvement. The solution's mobile application and management of dashboards are areas with shortcomings that need improvement.

Though there are a few features that I would like to see in future releases of the product, they cannot be made possible.

I have been using Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for a year. I am an integrator and not an end-user of the solution. I don't remember the product version I use.

It is a very stable solution. Besides a few outages from my power supply, I had no problems with the solution.

It is a scalable solution, though I never tried to use its scalability option. I don't even know how many devices you can add to the product.

I have, unfortunately, never interacted with the technical support team of the product. Based on the opinions of others, I came to know that the product's technical support team is very good.

I don't have any experience with other solutions at a business level. I work with Huawei and TP-Link at home, though I find Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN comparatively superior. Huawei and TP-Link's costs are very low, while Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is more reliable from both hardware and security point of view.

The initial setup of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN was very easy.

Though, I don't remember the steps involved in the deployment process of the solution since it was done a year ago. The deployment process was very simple because I only had to make a few clicks to create an account on the device to complete the deployment process. In the last stage of the deployment process, you need to put your license into the product and configure your SSID.

Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is not a reasonably priced product for home use. Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is a reasonably priced product for enterprise-sized businesses.

Apart from the firmware upgrades, no other processes are followed to maintain the solution.

I wouldn't recommend the product to those planning to use it at their home. I recommend the product to those planning to use it commercially in a certain industry or market.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

The last company I was working for did an overall network revamp project where they replaced all of the access points, switches, and firewalls. We replaced all the aging equipment with new ones including Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN solutions.

The automatic VMware update is very useful because you don't have to worry about outages and planning for VMware updates. It is very advantageous from a management point of view. The ability to restrict and review the clients connected to each of our segments. Additionally, the solution is easy to use.

Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN could improve by having more granularity in terms of the data displayed. However, I understand that with Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN, you need to have a compromise point to what are the functions that you're going to provide to the users versus ease of use. More granularity in terms of the data and the things that you can do to the devices would be helpful. For example, when we wanted to make a change, restriction, or segregation within Palo Alto, we can go to the level of detail that we want. The amount of detail provided is amazing, it is very granular. However, it comes with much more difficulty, it requires a technical understanding of the environment compared to Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN. 

I used Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN within the past 12 months.

I have not used the technical support because the equipment was new.

We used other vendor devices previously, such as Dell PowerConnect. We were looking for a solution that was easier to configure and maintain while not compromising the visibility of our environment. That's why we chose the Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN solutions because they have user-friendly dashboards to use the equipment and at the same time, it does provide the visibility that we needed to control our traffic in all our branches. 

When you are deploying equipment in remote areas where you don't have many employees having a cloud dashboard where you can make changes to your equipment easily is a large benefit. Having a centralized, single pane of glass dashboard where you can manage all your equipment in one place has been helpful.

The initial setup was very easy considering it is a Cisco solution.

It took us approximately two to three weeks, to migrate small branches which were quite fast. We hadn't migrated the head office systems when I left the company but that implementation would have been more complicated because that's where the data center is involved.

We hired a network architect as a consultant and that team helped us do the whole migration and implementation. When we were doing the setup of switching and the access points, it require a lot less preparation because of its ease of use. Other solutions, such as Palo Alto, required a lot more planning.

We have 12 branches and our head office and we use one person for marinating and supporting the solution. However, we did outsource the support, we pay annually for support from a third-party company that helps us maintain our equipment. They are on call if we need them.

I rate Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN an eight out of ten.

Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN was easy to deploy and use, it gives us the functionality that we need to maintain our infrastructure functions, and at the same time, it does provide the security that everybody's looking for these days. We did replace the firewalls with Palo Alto, which gives us another layer of security because Palo Alto's very good in that regard.

We are a reseller, and because we're doing mostly refreshes, we have its latest version.

Its interface is not as daunting as others, which makes customers a bit more at ease.

For Meraki, the ease of deployment and management is most valuable.

Meraki leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to the technical capabilities in terms of throughput, spectrum, management, higher-level functions, etc.

I have been using this solution for eight years or so.

Its stability is a five out of 10.

Its scalability is a five out of 10. 

I would probably rate them a six out of 10.

Meraki is probably the most straightforward. 

For its deployment and maintenance, just one engineer is required for a medium-sized company.

The return on the investment with Meraki isn't from scalability, rollout, or saving in hardware costs or software costs. The save is either in terms of the ability to keep the number of technicians that you hire or in terms of being able to outsource it all together to an organization that specializes in it. The higher costs of Meraki are offset by the cost of the people you may have to bring in, depending on your Wi-Fi airspace.

I would advise knowing your use case and matching it to the technology.

I would rate it a six out of 10. It provides ease of management to customers, but it is not for throughput and availability. 

These switches are part of our wireless network infrastructure. I have implemented them at 15 or 16 locations, each with between one and seven access points (APs).  

The emailing of statuses is the most valuable feature. For example, if you lose power to the building or you lose your internet connection, you get an email to explain that it has happened. This gives you the opportunity, even in the middle of the night, to be en route to solve the problem before the office even opens up.

They provide good visibility on what's going on.

The annual maintenance is something that needs to be changed.

I have been using Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN products for ten years.

These switches are very stable.

The technical support is very good. They are responsible and knowledgeable. On the Meraki side, you get through right away, whereas, on the Cisco side, you put in a call, and then it is difficult to predict when they will return it.

I have a large number of Meraki Wireless LAN switches including MR12, MR16, MR32, MR42, and MR46 models. I also use other Meraki equipment within our infrastructure.

These switches are very easy to set up, and it is also very easy to upgrade the firmware.

These units cost between $800 and $900 per device and on top of that, you have to pay yearly fees for maintenance. The annual maintenance costs about $75 per year, which is why we are moving away from this solution.

We are moving to another line of products because of the yearly maintenance fee.

We will be implementing Fortinet products in our infrastructure, with FortiAPs and our wireless access points. The speed of the FortiAP is triple that of my Meraki MR, and the purchase price is $500 versus $900. The is no annual maintenance fee on the FortiAP.

Fortinet is up and coming and on the leading edge right now.

In summary, this is a good product but we're moving away from Meraki because we no longer want to pay annual maintenance fees.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.