Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN Reviews

I think the IoT integration is the most valuable. I started applying IoT solutions 12 years ago on location-based services. Aruba had implemented this at the time. So I think the integration, particularly into the applications and stuff, is pretty interesting in Meraki. It's a substantial network from my point of view. It's good.

You're starting to see CO2-type sensors come into the classrooms and stuff like that. So it would be nice to build some "if-then" functions into IoT-type sensors. For instance, if a classroom has high CO2 levels, you could automatically open the Windows and use heat exchange to bring in fresh air into the room. At the same time, you could have the temperature control adjust automatically so it doesn't get too hot or too.  So you would need to plug in some configurable where you collect the output from the sensors and have it carry out some small actions based on that. I think it's well within Meraki's capabilities. 

I've been working in IT for 40 years. I was working on Nortel products even before Cisco, so I have more than 20 years of experience in WiFi alone.

Everything works. I can't knock the product. I know a lot of the senior management within Meraki and used to work with them at Nortel. I know many people who work on the product side, and I've never had a problem. I've deployed Meraki for one customer with 2,500 sites in the UK, and I don't think I've ever had a wireless AP go faulty on me. We've just never had a failure, to be quite honest. That's unusual.

The only thing that always causes problems with Meraki is the license. It's a bit of a bugbear with Meraki, and it remains today. So it's an unusual concept compared to the other products in the marketplace, but then it does cause a bit of a nuisance from time to time. The license they sell is difficult.

I've worked on Meraki and other Cisco products as well as Hewlett Packard, Aruba, Siemens, and Aerohive. Aruba's first-class product is easy to work with, and I've done a lot of the complicated location with services on the Aruba kit. Most of the WiFi solutions are pretty good. The main difference between products is the application integration for location-based or IoT services, and Meraki has a good lead. You can buy IoT centers that work. So I know they're pretty basic sensors, and they are a bit expensive. However, I don't think you can beat Meraki when you're talking about multiple deployments, particularly in retail and stuff like that. It's very good for that. With loads of different sites and small amounts of kit, it works perfectly. I haven't had many problems, and in the many times I've worked with the kit, it's never failed me. That's unusual.

I rate Cisco Meraki WLAN mine of 10. However, it would be a 10 out of 10 if it could apply some conditional logic where the result from a sensor triggers an action on another IoT device, such as a motorized heat exchanger, to bring fresh air into the building. If you were able to do something like that, it would improve things even more. It's a good LAN, but there's always room for improvement. There are some things that I'd like to see, such as more applications, integrations, and stuff like that, but apart from that, it's pretty good.

When you look at the benefits, some wireless solutions are more flexible than others. Meraki is easy to configure and monitor. The best thing Meraki can do is give them a test AP on their network because there is some problem with APN allowing other kits on the network and letting people test, but handover between the APs is satisfactory. I've got four APs in my home that go between the office, workshop, and high space, and the handover is still seamless. The coverage is brilliant from my point of view. I deployed it in a large warehouse, and handover was seamless. It was covered. To me, the easiest way is to get a customer to test their network with two, so they can do a handover and allow them to test and configure. That's plug-and-play.

We are resellers and our customers are generally medium to enterprise size organizations. I'm the senior manager and we are partners with Cisco. 

The dashboard is a great feature that is architecturally based and I like the fact that the solution is accessible from anywhere. As an administrator, it is very useful to have access to the dashboard from anywhere through my mobile Meraki app. I can see if there are any issues and can get alerts over my emails. The basic value of the product is the ease of use and ease of access from anywhere. The product is very easy to manage, easy to configure, and easy for our customers to understand. It's the ease of use that sells Meraki. When it's used as a whole stack, Meraki is one of the very good and easy to manage products.

There are a lot of improvements that could be made, especially from the feature point of view. If you compare the Meraki firewall to UTM, Meraki has close to 90% of all the features that UTM offers but there are some that are lacking and that need to be rectified. For example, UTM has a feature that enables you to block videos inside Facebook or block particular applications inside another application. In Meraki, you can only block the entire app or the entire URL. For example, you can block the category video, but not any applications that are inside apps. When it comes to switching, Meraki lacks categories of features, like the traditional Cisco, Aruba, or Ruckus app, and I think they need to increase the number of modules and categories of switches.

I've been using this solution for almost six years. 

 The product is stable and I have not seen any issues over the past couple of years.

The solution is scalable, the only problem we had earlier was the Meraki firewall did not support more than two ISC links, but I think the hardware has matured and can now support more than two ISC links. Some years ago now, Meraki used to lose many customers because it didn't support more than two ISC links.

It's very easy to get support from Meraki, because everything is there in the dashboard. You just need to open a case through the dashboard and you get good support. 

The pricing is a little higher than other similar architecture products such as Ruckus or Aruba. Meraki has a premium pack added to it so it's costly.

If you're a medium enterprise type of organization, I'd recommend something like Meraki, at least from the wireless point of view, because I think it has a very, very simple and easy-to-use dashboard. As mentioned, it's easy to configure and very easy to manage. Wherever there are very low resources to manage a network, Meraki is the one. If a company isn't managing many people and there aren't too many network administrators, it's a very good solution. 

I rate the solution seven out of 10. 

We use it for wireless and our network. All our switches and our APs are Meraki.

We are using its latest version. The device is on-prem, but everything is on the cloud. Meraki has its own cloud.

It is easy to set up. You can do everything on the GUI. You don't need to trace cables. You don't need to connect to the switch. Everything is there, right in front of you.

They're great. If there's anything that they need to change, it is just simplifying the site to which you go to make changes on the admin side.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It is very stable.

I can add or remove without any issues. So, scalability is no issue. It is being extensively used in the organization at the moment.

I have never contacted their support. It has always been great.

We used to have just the plain Cisco, and we just switched to Meraki. We switched because in the past, for you to trace or change VLANs and all that, you actually needed to log into the actual switch and make the changes there. You had to run a lot of commands and all that, but with Meraki, you could just go to their portal and make the changes there. Everything is kind of right in front of you. So, it makes things so much easier.

It is easy to set up. It took weeks because we had to install it, but the setup itself only took an hour or two.

It was done in-house. In terms of maintenance, it is very lightweight. I'm the admin for it. We do have other IT staff, but they don't really have to do much.

I would advise others to go and get it now. If you don't have it, get it.

I would rate it a nine out of 10 for the ease of use.

I've worked on this solution for a couple of clients who already had it deployed. It has many good features and good integration. This is more of a hybrid setup where the switch takes over a lot of responsibility depending upon what you have deployed. It takes a lot of control and allows for cloud-based management of your Wi-Fi network.

One of the key problems is that, similar to a solution like Ruckus, if you lose connectivity with the controller, your Wi-Fi network is immediately impacted and users are unable to connect to the network. It's a challenge because then your budget inflates as you have to invest in a high availability kind of solution and have more than one controller. If you are spread across a large area geographically, then you may want to have multiple controllers at different sites so that if one fails you always have a backup to go to and you're not dependent on the links that connect to your offices. It can become costly as a result. 

There is nothing much that can change but I believe the hardware could become more economical. The licensing part is okay, and compared to other cloud-managed Wi-Fi's, Meraki is well placed on the pricing, but the hardware costs a bomb. If they could reduce the price of the hardware, the access points, that would be a great benefit for them.

The solution is stable and more secure when you compare it to Ruckus because if you have an MX firewall, you automatically get the firewall features over your Wi-Fi as well. The outcome is that all the data passing through the Wi-Fi definitely passes through the firewall. 

Meraki is quite scalable. 

Thanks to my experience with Wi-Fi, I haven't needed tech support from Meraki. One good point about Meraki and Cisco overall would be the documentation. It's extremely comprehensive so that you don't need to call tech support unless you encounter a specific problem, and you can find most things by doing a Google search.

I believe the initial setup is pretty straightforward although I've never deployed the solution - I've managed it for clients. We currently have three companies that are using this product. From a maintenance perspective, it requires a couple of maintenance staff to keep a tab on the solution, depending upon your work environment. 

Licensing is on an annual basis and there is also the hardware inventory. If the firewall goes down, for example, that could cause a problem. The point of failure and the work involved around it makes it a more costly solution.

For anyone looking for a simple management solution in a geographically spread-out network, Meraki is a good bet compared to Ruckus. However, they lose points on the cost as well as on the complexity of its multiple-tiered structure, where you have an MX firewall or a switch, your Wi-Fi access points, and then the cloud. It's too much and could be as easy as having the cloud and access points, but the product has an additional tier integrated, which makes it somewhat complex.

I would place them at eight out of 10. 

With Cisco Meraki, I've tried motherboard, switches, and wireless, and everything is good. If you want to complete visibility, then you are required just a firewall and switches, and wireless. 

The solution offers good features and good performance. It's quite stable. We have never faced challenges just from our ID access point.

You can scale the solution easily.

The problem with the solution is that if you go for firewall, then there is no SSL encryption available. If you are talking about deep packet inspection, that is not available. If you want SSL encryption, then you have to integrate with Cisco Umbrella. 

If they could work on the Meraki firewall hardware, and add SSL decryption as well as more application control and deep packet inspection, that would be ideal. 

Also in Cisco Meraki access points, MAC filtering is not available. If they could add that feature, that would be great.

I've been using the solution for two or three years at this point. It's been a while. 

The stability is very good. There are no bugs. There are no glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

This is a cloud-based product and the best thing about a cloud-based product is if you have a cloud controller and access point, then you don't have to worry about that key for licenses. If you've got 70 access points, you can register there. If you have 1,000 and 2,0000, you can also register there. There is no need to change any controller hardware as that is a cloud-based product, which makes it fully scalable. You can add to it and still maintain a single point of management. 

This is a pure cloud-based solution and everything is managed by the cloud.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I haven't deployed it for myself. I have deployed it for customers. I work for a systems integrator.

We use it for Branch-type of installations where you have a small branch. You just need to manage it via the internet. You don't need a controller-type of environment there, for a small office-type of deployment.

It's a cheaper resource that helps manage a company's WiFi network.

The solution's ease of use is great.

The ease of management has been great.

The initial setup is easy.

The product has been very stable over the years. 

Technical support is okay.

The pricing is reasonable. 

Meraki is still very much a small office type of solution. It is not a fit for large enterprise networks, as it doesn't have tunneling functionalities. 

If you are configuring Meraki as a RADIUS client, you have to add individual 100 or whatever devices on the site as a RADIUS client. There is no RADIUS proxy option. Therefore, it is pretty much still a good use case for small networks, however, it's not a great use case for larger networks. 

The product needs to offer role-based access. 

I've been using the solution for more than ten years now. It's been a decade or so. I have quite a bit of experience with it.

The solution is very stable. As long as your internet links are stable, Meraki works perfectly fine. There are no bugs or glitches. it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

Meraki is not a very scalable solution. It has its own limitations on the number of devices you can deploy. I would say it's not a very scalable solution.

I've contacted technical support a couple of times. They were okay. I didn't have any issues with them; they are fine.

I've used Cisco EROs, Cisco Meraki, Catalyst 9800, Aruba, and Instant Aruba, controller-based.

The initial setup is not complex or difficult. It's very straightforward. 

The pricing is okay. However, they don't have a perpetual license option. Regardless of what type of functionality a customer is looking for, they have to go for subscription-based licensing.

I'm a Cisco partner.

Meraki is a public cloud. With Meraki, you don't have a private cloud solution.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for our campus environment.

The solution has worked very well in our campus environment. 

The solution has proven itself to be very stable so far.

The product is very easy to use.

The initial setup is very straightforward and easy.

We've found the connectivity to be excellent.

We would like the solution to work on the pricing of the solution. It would be ideal if it could bring the overall costs down.

We haven't even used the solution for a year yet. We've used it for about six months or so. It hasn't been that long just yet.

The stability is very good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. It's been good so far.

The solution can scale quite well. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so fairly easily.

We currently use the solution in order to cover 500 users at our company.

Our company does plan to increase usage in the future.

Technical support has been fine. We've found them to be helpful and responsive. We're satisfied with the level of support we receive.

The installation was very straightforward, from what I recall. A company shouldn't have any trouble with the initial setup. It's not overly complex or difficult. 

The deployment is pretty fast. It only took us about two hours or so. 

We did not need the assistance of a consultant or integrator. We handled the initial implementation ourselves. We handled it in-house.

The pricing could be cheaper. It's the one pain point.

We pay a monthly fee.

We are using the latest version of the solution. I can't speak to the actual version number.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We haven't used it for that long, however, we have been quite satisfied with its overall capabilities.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations and users.

We use it for Wi-Fi.

It is cloud-based. You can manage it remotely from anywhere in the world, and you don't have to be on-site, which is a very big advantage.

It is super expensive for what you get. I just wish it was less expensive.

I have been using this solution for 20 years.

It is stable and very reliable.

You just buy more. In terms of the number of users, it is used by everyone in the organization. It is Wi-Fi, so you hook your phone or laptop. Everybody uses it.

Their technical support is very good. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

I've used Ubiquiti. The reason I use them is that they're very inexpensive, but they're not cloud-based. You have to be on-premises in order to manage them.

It is really easy.

It is super expensive for what you get. You also have to buy a license every year. Otherwise, it stops working.

If you can afford it, you should go for it.

I would rate Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN a six out of ten. The biggest downside is the yearly fee and the initial price, but it is very reliable.