Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN Reviews

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.

We use Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for offices, small retail stores, and restaurants. Most of our clients are medium-sized businesses.

Most of our clients have around 200 employees. There are around 50 access point users.

Only one person is required for maintenance.

The captive portal feature is my favorite. It allows us to keep track of how many people are entering our client's businesses. 

Also, the security and content filtering that's included on the cloud is great.

The signal coverage radius could be extended. I would also like to have a planner for designs. 

I have been using Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for roughly eight years.

Stability-wise, it's very good. The problem is the coverage.

Scalability-wise, it's excellent. You can integrate with other products like MX, the firewall and router of Meraki, and you can also integrate with Umbrella which is cloud security from Cisco. You can also add more access points very easily.

Cisco's technical support is excellent. Still, sometimes it takes a while for them to respond. There is also a lot of information on their web page for support.

We used to use Aruba and Cisco Access Point. Cloud management was the main difference between these solutions. We have more flexibility with Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN.

The initial setup is easy but it's important to have training.

Configuration takes around one hour. It's the same for any access point but the installation depends on the physical installation — overall, it takes around three hours.

Meraki is a very good solution, but the price is quite high for small markets. We are based in Mexico and within Latin America, most of our customers think that this is an expensive solution compared to other brands. Overall, we think that the price is too high.

For example, the cheapest license subscription is around $600. It's around $1,200 for one access point. This is really expensive for one customer. Other brands charge the same amount for around five access points.

I'd recommend this solution because it's easy to use and secure — the security is integrated. Apps can also be integrated very easily and it's very scalable. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN a rating of eight. 

We resell it to our customers for networking, wifi, and security.

For some of our larger clients, it has enabled them to not need to grow staff in order to retain a large 13 access point network has needed a lot of reconfiguration because of the nature of our business. We are able to maintain that and the responses even after hours because we can usually make changes rapidly.

Its ability to be cloud-managed is the most valuable feature so if there's a reconfiguration or an issue, we have excellent visibility into the network and we can usually resolve the problem online without having to go onsite.

The logging sometimes doesn't give us the granularity needed. Some of the rules are a bit more complicated. The switch ports on the routers are not individually addressable, in the sense that with a switch you can tell what MAC address is on what port but with the security appliances, you can't, which would be beneficial for troubleshooting.

I would like to see more information on what is plugged into each MX switch port. I would also like to be able to see that the templates would be able to be used because we're in MSP, so if I create a template, I have to recreate the template with each of our clients. I'd prefer to create one template and then personalize it for each client which is a little extra work that way. 

The dashboard security is not as good as it could be in terms of provision users. If I provision the user at the high level, I'd like to give them rights to our customers so if I have a new technician, I have to go and touch each customer and add that technician which is kind of silly. 

It's quite stable. There are relatively few issues we've had with the product. Compared to others, it's more stable than most.

It scales well up to the larger midsize enterprise. The MX appliances are less scalable than the wifi or the switches. They're a little underpowered and so that's the point where you'd move to a different solution if you needed more scalability if you had more bandwidth requirements. We currently have 150 users. 

Their technical support is good. It's really easy to get someone and they try to help and work to resolve the issue. I'm pleased with their support.

We've also used D-Link, Netgear, and other similar solutions and Cisco small business solutions as well. We found Meraki is easier to deploy and easier to maintain.

We also evaluated WatchGuard, SonicWall, and Ubiquiti but we found Meraki to be superior. 

The initial setup. The deployment was very quick. It takes under half an hour to fully deploy on site.

We've definitely had a good ROI. It helps our support resources as well as gives the customer a good product.

Meraki is certainly not the cheapest solution. The coterminous licensing that they do is a challenge with some of the sites where there's corporate and franchise sites. If a franchise is buying in and they want to put them on the same dashboard, it means that their license is going to expire earlier than it should. The fact that if you don't license it, it just stops working has been a challenge. It's not as friendly as would be ideal, where other solutions will not allow you to do any changes but it will keep working. If some of our clients are less organized at renewals this is a little bit adverse. MX appliances are a little overpriced for their power.

I would rate this solution 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.

The solution is very easy to use. The user interface is very nice.

There are really great dashboards available. Users can see everything they need to on one pane of glass.

Users have the capability of capturing business insights on the solution. For example, we can see who uses the WiFi or monitor movement.

The solution should be open to introducing more IoT sensors and to have a more complete solution to medium-sized customers.

The solution could saturate more of the market, as likely 80% of the market would like to see more simple solutions such as Meraki.

It would be ideal if you didn't necessarily have to go to professionals to get a product like this. It should be sold more in the retail space. 

It would be great if the solution could integrate with Amazon Alexa. We'd be able to leverage Meraki and build more intelligent homes and businesses. It would help us build new items we could deliver to our clients, and to build better B2C relations.

It would be nice to have licensing that stays in place while the system is being renovated or changed. If there was a way to have remote WiFi to support local connections during issues, so that technical support doesn't have to shut down the entire network, that would be great. If there was something like a robot that could continue running the network while there are licensing or technical issues, so that WiFi never goes down, that would be an ideal situation.

We used to sell other Cisco solutions, however, now we only really focus on Meraki.

The solution from Meraki is more public cloud, however, if we need to we have an internal team that manages alarms, and coordinates action zone disputes to changes devices when it is needed, and have support to our customers.

We have partners that can sell the solution to us, and we in turn offer them to our clients. We're similar to a reseller.

In general, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

The dashboard is the solution's most valuable feature. It's very user-friendly. It's a good solution for people that don't have a big technical team.

In many wireless solutions, there are a lot of things that can be added, like WiFi 6. 

Meraki should share its viability roadmap. It is really hard to know which functionality will appear or when they will be available. It is also hard to know which features are available now but are not visible on the dashboard.

In France, there's a law that requires we should keep a log of connection for 1 year, so it would be really nice to have a solution or feature that allows us to keep a log in the cloud during the year with log rotations and secure log authorizations. Right now, in France, it is not possible.

So far, we haven't had issues with stability. 

The solution is easily scalable. There are not really any limits for the customer in terms of expanding if they need to.

The technical support of Meraki is very good. They're always quick to answer. You can create a case on your dashboard and after a maximum of 30 minutes, they contact you. This is a great process. Many other solutions should copy their support model. 

The initial setup is easy; it's not complex at all.

In terms of deployment, depending on the customer, it can be installed rather quickly. A customer can even handle the installation themselves.  Some may need more help with design, and it can take a bit more time to do that, but overall it's rather simple. 

We're a partner with Cisco. We create architecture for customers and design solutions for surveillance products. We also deploy WiFi production engineers from our company.

My advice to others considering implementation is to be aware of Meraki limitations. If you are not sure if the features you need are available, you should verify that with Meraki. It will keep you from having any surprises down the road.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's a really good product.

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.

The dashboard to keep track of 30 or so APs, switches, routers and logs, is invaluable. I liked the UX on this.

Notifications (minus the techno-speak so it's obvious what the problem is) help us respond to access points down or rogue access points attempting connections.

Tracking the usage of staff, access points, switches and routers becomes an insanely easy thing and so do producing reports for your Exec team.

Splash screens for T&C sign off by users are very easy to implement - it takes about 30 seconds to put a splash screen up. RADIUS and SSO are possible with similar ease.

Networks can be segmented into SSIDs very easily for those needing to provided users, office, POS, Events, etc, with seperated access. You can then monitor the usage down to a single MAC address for great granularity.

Reporting is easy - press two buttons et viola!

It's cut down the amount of time administering an expansive WiFi network spread over 43 acres.

We can easily monitor the up/down time so establishing KPIs and SLAs for the IT department becomes something attainable.

Adding APs is a very simple process. Plug in. Turn on. Meshes with the existing network. In an emergency, almost anyone can do it.

The error logs need to be much more comprehensive.

4 years

There can be problems if using older POS devices, WiFi APs, and you have a lot of people with mobiles around. So, say, a large event. The mix of signals can kill the WiFi APs and then you are left hard wiring "mobile" tills. Be aware if you're carrying old equipment.

Good.

Very good. Some times the odd problem may drag and require a dog-with-a-bone approach but that's the same everywhere.

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