Fortinet FortiWLM Reviews

We have used the solution in an electrical company, however, they are using it for Internet only access. That is being used as the main connection to the network and is completely separate as it is being used only for Internet access on mobile devices mostly.

I have used the multiple feature keys that were available and they allow each user to have their own feature key. 

A good feature is the IP security profiles, IPFS, anti-virus, RIP filtering, as that can be used with FortiGate as a wireless controller.

The solution is stable.

Technical support is helpful.

The scalability is good.

Although there are a few steps, the initial setup is pretty straightforward.

There is a need to put a logging device in, which could be an analyzer, so that, if you want to have an inside-up graph and weekly and monthly graphics reports, you'd be able to do so.

When using the FortiGate as the wireless controller, you cannot have automatic user registration, which is something that they should offer. That way, you can email the user, in their account, and it would be easier.

We haven't heard any negative feedback about the stability. The clients seem happy. I haven't heard of bugs or glitches. It's reliable.

The scalability is good. Our clients seem happy with its capabilities.

In terms of technical support, it depends on your license. From my experience, they have been available at any time and they can help with troubleshooting by going into the command line and stuff like that. They are helpful and responsive.

The initial setup is a little more work due to the fact that we have to set up the controller. It's not as difficult, however, you have more steps.

For a small setup, you only need one person to manage the implementation.

I have not looked into ROI as of yet.

We are a Fortinet partner. I have used the U 231, the U 431F versions of the solution.

You can implement this solution and get authentication, and we'd like to see more features for onboarding and reporting.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

My clients use Fortinet FortiWLM for wireless management in healthcare, hospitality, and office settings.

Fortinet FortiWLM is good for tracking assets, monitoring, and overall management.

In the next release, they could improve by adding a controller-less server, or architecture that is provided in other solutions, such as Aruba. This would be a great benefit for customers. Additionally, they could improve the feature sets to be more competitive.

The solution is stable and highly reliable. We do not have any complaints from customers.

We have currently three clients using this solution.

For critical infrastructure in healthcare and government, we find Aruba a better solution for their requirements.

If we are redoing an installation of an existing network are some difficulties but a typical installation is not difficult.

There is a perpetual license required for this solution and the price could be reduced.

I would recommend this solution.

I rate Fortinet FortiWLM a seven out of ten.

We are similar to our customer implementation. We provide a switch, we have provided even the firewall, Apache, and SolarWinds solutions. So when we are talking about Apache, completely it is taken out first. Then monitoring or patching with iPhones, it is much better. It is very simplified when comparing it to any other product. I think the product doesn't have challenges. I didn't find any challenges with Fortinet Wireless.

Documentation could be improved.

I have been using and selling Fortinet Wireless for 13 years.

We have been very happy with the stability of the product.

Fortinet Wireless is very scalable.

Once you have a subscription, it works. After that, you open tickets with their technical support. There's no other challenge. We haven't needed to contact technical support as everything is pretty straightforward.

In many of my other previous companies, Fortinet Wireless has been used. I haven't had many challenges. Apart from that, when I became a system integrator, I found that It's really good when comparing it to any other product or it is much better in terms of features that the customer requires.

I have my own team who are satisfied with the product. There are two or three engineers on the team. They normally handle the implementation of Fortinet Wireless.

The licensing is all contained in the purchase and implementation. The customer will look at the licensing at purchase and make sure all is in order. All the subscriptions that are relevant for the purchase and maintenance are involved. The implementation will be monitored and have a secure wireless connection.

We have a partnership with Sophos also. But with Sophos, we have a lot of customers, more than with Fortinet. When you compare the features and, reliability and performance, Fortinet is better.

Fortinet Wireless is a very good product, in terms of reliability and in terms of configuration also. I would rate Fortinet wireless at a nine out of ten.

Our primary use is for official purposes. On our campus, there are two employees who have a laptop and move here and there, and sub-faculties are always trying to connect to Google or other resources, for any documentation purposes. The facility is huge. So for online purposes, we give them the flexibility so that wherever they are on campus they can easily connect to the internet.

All their features are common. Nothing more. All the features are controlled behind the Fortinet firewall. Is there any wireless controller to balance the load? Or what report do they give for the stated purpose? Basically, we need to put more focus on the reporting end for their sustainability.

I have been using Fortinet Wireless for the last five years.

The product is a stable solution.

In terms of scalability, we will not replace Fortinet for our staff purposes. But we have a very large group of students for whom we are planning to use it to give them online education. For that purpose, we are planning to handle the number of 40,000 students on our campus so that we can synchronize real data over any streaming material or tablet.

Because of that, because of the technology changes every year, this is not suitable for the search crowd.

Technical support is very poor. We are not satisfied with the technical support because there is not any direct person from Fortinet for any troubleshooting, which we expected.

On a scale from one to 10, where one is the worst and 10 is the best, I would rate Fortinet Wireless three out of 10.

You may discuss this with any of the other clients who are using Fortinet. I think you will find out what kind of support Fortinet gives because there is no direct person involved from the Fortinet side to give client support. They depend on the mediator or integrators or suppliers. They help. They are trained but they are not from Fortinet. I would not go with Fortinet. You can think of it as a customer buying a Fortinet product from the company and the company has stopped their service. Then who will look after those clients? 

So I think there should be a direct person who provides service to the client. It could either be a portal or there could be another way to improve the services.

I have a friend who used to work at Sun Microsystems and when they were bought by Oracle he moved to Fortinet Switzerland. Now he is the boss of the wireless section of Fortinet Switzerland. We are building an apartment building with 30 floors that is the tallest residential building in the country. The name is Jabee Tower in Dübendorf. We have two penthouse flats there and each flat has 14 wireless access points. That is more access points than you could have with any other normal wifi system; you can not buy this kind of access capability through another vendor.  

We have committed to the technology and now we are dependent on the Fortinet controller and the V2 cell technology which is exclusive to Fortinet. Fortinet obtained this by buying out a company called Meru Systems which is the inventor of the concept of V2 cell. The product allows their product to always maintain the same SSID (Service Set Identifier) for the BSSID (Basic Service Set Identifier) clients using the service. It is a kind of breakthrough in technology. So it is really unique and there is no competition for this type of solution at the moment. That is why Fortinet is the leading manufacturer in this area of cell technology.  

The leading-edge technology was the reason I came to use Fortinet — not only because my friend was working there. But because their technology is very much on the leading edge of the marketplace we have a lot of interesting opportunities.  

The concept of V2R cell services [similar to wifi hotspot technology], is a concept where a controller monitors the access points in the installation. It is possible to reduce the transmission power and that can reduce exposure of users and the community to the electrobiological effects of wifi. The goal is to try to reduce the radio power necessary and to only transmit the signal that you have to transmit to reach the access point.  

In my work, I try to protect people from electronic emissions and V2R is one of my weapons against the current problems with exposure to wifi. You do not have to go blindly like Norway does and transmit with 100 milliwatts or 200 milliwatts of exposure if you have a better solution like V2R.  

So the concepts where the controller is involved must be used in order to reach these goals at this time. In the Aruba product there is also a solution for the controller, but it does not do as much as the Fortinet. So Fortinet is alone on the ground level with this new concept.  

On the other hand, the V2R cell solution has a limited lifespan because we know that wifi six is coming up. Wifi six is solving the transmission problems of wifi roaming in a different way. But for now, there is no competition for the V2R cell.  

Something that can be improved by Fortinet is the organization-wide policy on service contracts. I find that it is a little bit stressful. They have a business model where whatever you buy, you must make a service contract. You can do that for one year or three years or five years. But it seems a little bit like a moneymaking machine rather than a necessity. They require these service contracts and that is not always so well accepted by the clients.  

To judge the circumstances of the market by bigger business clients who can afford these additional fees may not be the best way to create policy. I work mostly with smaller clients on the threshold of breaking into a bigger business landscape. Mostly those clients are private people and for these people, these business requirements Fortinet has in place are not the best way to build up their successes.  

I guess I cannot criticize their practices as failing because the company is obviously successful with it. I understand that they also need to make money for evolution, for research and development to stay competitive. But for the private sector, there is a gap. You have these professional suppliers like Aruba and Fortinet and then you have the small suppliers whose products you can buy in the shop around the corner. There is nothing in between. I think Fortinet could be more friendly toward smaller companies and individuals so they could have success with the products while building their businesses and then they are more likely to continue to use the products later.  

I guess one other improvement they might consider making is with the design of the product. They do not have the most beautiful equipment I have seen in my life. They could hire a designer and the products could be improved substantially in a visual way.  

I have been using this product for about one year.  

The stability is perfect. I have no problems with the product in that way.  

My clients could be any size: small, medium or enterprise companies. It does not matter but for the costs. All size users can be my clients, but for the moment I am mostly involved with private clients. I am involved in electrobiology in my personal endeavors. Wifi is on the corner of our activity because it is part of this field somewhat tangentially, but I am more of a consultant in electrobiology with an interest in how radio transmissions from wifi affects people.  

I had some calls with Fortinet technical support, which is in India, and I had some very good experiences with their team. It was very professional and I got my answers within a reasonable time.  

I'm quite happy with both their online support and telephone support. It is very professional and there is nothing to complain about in that respect.  

Before Fortinet Wireless, I was working with Aruba. Aruba was not bad and we did use it quite a bit before it was bought by HP. But it did not have the same capabilities as Fortinet. We also used ASUS [a name derived from Pegasus] Access Point for some time. I have used modified third-party firmware called Tomato that can help control the behavior of different routers from other manufacturers. I also used DD-WRT [DD is the German car numberplate code for Dresden, Germany; WRT is "Wireless Receiver/Transmitter"] which is another third-party firmware solution.  

When we started, we were using Linksys hardware a lot and then we switched to ASUS hardware. Then we went with this special firmware Tomato released for our ASUS hardware. That was a good solution and it was our main product for a while. It was a progression over time.  

The difficulty of the initial setup probably depends a lot on the level of user who is trying to use it. In the beginning, it took me only one day to do the setup because I had some similar experience. It took me one day for Aruba and it took me one day for Fortinet. The average, intelligent person can learn to set up this solution in a short period of time. But I would not say that it is intuitive for just anyone. You have to learn some theory about the controller and what the controller is doing. You have to read a few manuals. But it is almost intuitive, in general, and easy if you have some experience and are willing to learn. It is not made for a common laborer or for a housewife. It is made for an engineer who can read the manual and understand what is supposed to happen. It is quite usable in that case.  

We do the deployments and implementations ourselves.  

Fortinet would do something with their pricing model to attract smaller business users and eliminate the mandatory service contracts.  

There is currently no competition for the Fortinet product. My experience over time with providing wifi solutions was my evaluation period.  

My advice to people is that the V2R radio solution is very good and that they should give it a try. Get a few access points — the minimum is two — to experience the V2R access concept.  

When I was first playing with the solution, I set up the software controller on a virtual machine in the lab. Just with two access points, one controller and the V2 concept. That was an eye-opening experience. When you see it working, you immediately become a fan. You will make a prayer for this technology.  

What is not so good is that Meru came out with the solution a little too late because now it will have a limited life and it will die. In five years, it will be obsolete. That is the long-term downside, but for the moment there is no alternative.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Fortinet Wireless as a nine-out-of-ten. They could improve a few things like the fact that the access points get a little hot and use a lot of energy. It is running at 30 watts per access point. Also, you need to power the access points over the ethernet, so the ethernet power must be strong. It is not possible to power it from switches. They should do something about the power problem.  

But even with the drawbacks, my recommendation to others would be to give the solution a try.  

We are a technical services company and this is one of the solutions that we provide to our clients. My client was interested in adding a guest network to the existing infrastructure. The main requirement was that the new access points needed to be able to integrate properly, but any guests should not be able to connect to his main network.

It was a very old network with no VLAN and there was no interest in implementing one. This solution allowed for the creation of different networks without the need for a VLAN or the installation of layer two switches.

The most valuable feature is the ability to connect and broadcast to different networks without using a VLAN or a layer two switch, which allows you to easily create guest networks. This is a very useful and very different feature compared to other solutions on the market. In every customer meeting, this is the feature that we highlight.

The solution is easy to use and the GUI is user-friendly.

The guest management features need to be improved by adding automation. There is a facility for guest management through a portal, but it should be automatic. As it is now, the IT person has to edit and do things manually. All of the details should be maintained in the FortiCloud.

I would like to see some small access points or signal extenders added to the product line to help with areas that do not have full coverage. 

I have been working with Fortinet wireless for the past seven years, and for fourteen years in total with Fortinet solutions.

In the past seven years that I have been working with this solution, I have not had any issues regarding stability.

This scalability is good.

I have been in contact with technical support a few times, although it was for known product issues that required doing things like installing a new driver. Overall, I would rate them to be good.

We have deployed solutions from D-Link and NETGEAR for certain clients, although they have not needed to have the depth of features that are offered by Fortinet Wireless. These include both security options and the facility for providing a guest network.

The initial setup is easy and user-friendly. The deployment is highly efficient, and it may take 25 minutes to configure if you have a maximum of ten access points. At most, it may take three to four hours.

For indoor access points, there is a one-time cost, upfront, whereas outdoor access points have an annual fee.

Compared to some of the wireless solutions by Cisco, Aruba, and HP, this product is a little bit costly. However, Fortinet has good security and other good features that the customers are interested in.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We started the utilization in our warehouse to improve the connection for our hand scanner and cameras. 

The Access Points work with two radios (2.4GHz and 5GHz) and it was the best feature because some scanners are new with AC wireless support. The firewall integration was another good feature because is very fast to setup.

The firewall integration is very important for the security of the connection. For each SSID it's possible to create rules to specify connections.

This solution should be easier to set up in a production environment.

We intend to implement this solution in our production area and eventually replace cable connections with wireless service.

I've been doing pre-sales engineering for most Fortinet products. Wireless is one of our main products, where there's a good market. I have been involved in a few of the implementations including the designing. One was a warehouse and there was another one where we helped design a wireless network for a public youth center. The youth center was a fairly big building. There was the basketball court and they had the library, etc. I designed the network around that.

There was another where we did the design for a retail shop. For them, the requirement was high-performance WiFi because there were going to be a lot of customers in the retail shop. They needed a very strong WiFi without having any network drops.

Nowadays, the biggest problem in modern networks is that you have one vendor for wireless and you have another vendor for your SIEM, another vendor for firewall, and an entirely different vendor doing anti-virus. The problem here is that if somebody were to infiltrate your network, you would have to pull information from all these different products. It goes without saying that these different vendors' products don't talk to each other. That means you would have to manually correlate all this information. With the faster threats that we have today, by the time you correlate anything and then come to a conclusion, the damage is already done.

But with the Security Fabric, all these products - let's say you have Fortinet Wireless and you have FortiGate as your firewall and on the endpoints you run FortiClient - they talk to each other, and you have 100 percent visibility across the entire network. If somebody, for example, from the accounting department brought in a USB that they picked up on the road and plugged into their computer, and it had a virus or a botnet, since you have visibility across the entire network, the IT manager would be able to clearly see this and take action.

But for most people, since their anti-virus is just one of their products, it's not going to inform the firewall or the switch or the WiFi that it has a problem. It's only going to be the anti-virus that will, hopefully, will catch it. If it doesn't catch it, that virus or problem can spread throughout the network without anybody noticing.

The two main points of the Security Fabric are the visibility and knowledge-sharing. Given that we have the Security Fabric properly implemented in the network and we have a FortiSandbox in place, if a Zero-day attack comes into your network, nobody will be the wiser. But your computer's anti-virus detects it as a suspicious file. It will load it up into the sandbox and the sandbox will run that program and give a red light when it realizes that it's a bad program. Since most of the products in the Security Fabric can talk to the sandbox, the sandbox will let every other point in the network know that it was a bad file. So from one of those files being uploaded into the sandbox, the entire network security infrastructure will have a new signature for that Zero-day, which doesn't happen in any other cases.

One valuable feature that comes to mind is the Network-In-Control. Usually, when there's WiFi, it's the WiFi client - your phone - that decides which AP to stick to. Your phone will stick with the closest AP, even though there may be another AP that's a bit farther away that has better bandwidth. Since your phone only decides based on the strongest signal, it would stick to the one with the stronger signal, the one that may not have enough bandwidth.

But with Fortinet, there is a feature called Network-In-Control. It's the AP controller that decides what the clients are going to connect to. In this case, the phone doesn't choose which AP you're connecting to, it's the wireless AP controller. Even though your phone sees, let's say, two APs, since the wireless controller has visibility into and access across all the APs, it knows the best AP for the client to connect to. This way, the controller makes sure that none of the APs is over-crowded, and the spectrum is used properly.

Fortinet Wireless has two appliances. The first thing is the wireless controller which does the AP setup and controlling. But it's the Fortinet Wireless Manager that gives you all the visibility, the logging and monitoring, etc.

If you do have a FortiGate Firewall somewhere in the network, you can connect the wireless controller to that. The Fortinet holistic approach is called the Security Fabric. That is the single-pane management for every Fortinet product in a single network. You get 100 percent visibility from a single point, which is, most of the time, the FortiGate. You can see everything that's connected to the FortiGate, whether it's a switch or a wireless AP or a wireless controller or any other Fortinet product. If you connect them through the Security Fabric you can actually see what's happening from end to end. If you're at the perimeter FortiGate and there's a client that's connecting through it, maybe six floors down the line, you can just go and have a look at the client end point from the perimeter FortiGate. And if that end point is compromised you can take it off the network easily.

There are three methods that Fortinet offers wirelessly. The first is industrial, where you have a wireless controller separately and you don't have a FortiGate in the equation. The second is what we call integrated: You get a FortiAP that connects directly to your FortiGate. The third is cloud AP where you just have the AP and you control it through the cloud. On that, they could improve the management side of it. The management side is a bit lacking in its reporting.

One of the main features that I see as lacking in any of the Fortinet products is the reporting. If you want to have proper, end-to-end reporting, you must purchase the FortiAnalyzer which is the dedicated reporting and analyzing tool. For a small customer who has only a few APs, you can't justify asking them to run the FortiAnalyzer because that will incur some amount of cost. If Fortinet could offer some better, built-in reporting, that would be a point of improvement.

The stability is fine on its own, but we can do high-availability where we have multiple wireless controllers, in case one goes down.

Scalability is pretty high. In a large enterprise, the single largest box we have is the Forti FWC-3000 which can hold up to 30,000 clients. That's just one box. If we need more I'm sure we can scale more.

I haven't had the chance to see the Wireless technical support side of the operation. Fortinet Wireless' tech is pretty knowledgeable about what they're doing so I would assume that their tech support caters pretty well. But I can't give a solid answer because I haven't had any experience with them.

I do come in contact with their tech support pretty often when it comes to dealing with FortiGates, and their help is very good.

If it's an industrial setup, it's a bit complex. You need to know what you're doing. An everyday manager wouldn't be able to set it up properly because you need to know how to secure it properly and set all the settings.

For an industrial deployment, if you get engineers who are knowledgeable, it would be pretty easy for them. They could set it up within a day. The integrated WiFi, where you connect the AP to the FortiGate, will take a couple of minutes. The cloud WiFi is actually a zero-touch deployment. You can just ship it to a branch office, have them connect it to the internet, and it will configure itself automatically.

In terms of an implementation strategy for an industrial deployment, the first step would be to do a proper wireless survey by somebody who understands the field. Something that I have seen, where most people go wrong, is that the network engineers or the network administrator in the company think they how to design the network. In the diagram they place the APs where they think would be the optimal placements. Later on, when they've done the purchase and setting up, they figure out it's not optimal. Either they have wasted money by putting in too many APs, or they have not assigned enough APs to power the entire network. When it comes to wireless LAN networks, step number one should be getting a proper WiFi survey done to suit your requirements. After that it's easy.

The survey requires just one person. For a deployment, I'm not sure how many people will be required to set up the APs, because if it's a big conventional hall, for example, then you are going to need some professional people doing the WiFi mounting, etc. After that, configuration-wise, it is a one-person job.

I don't think that any organization will have somebody who is qualified to do a deployment by themselves. This is a niche product. If a company is going to introduce Fortinet Wireless into their network, the IT administrators would not know how to configure it. They would have to get somebody who knows it. After that, they could get training for maintaining it. The administration will then take just one person.

In terms of cost of ownership, as a WiFi solution on its own, I would say it is pretty similar to every other vendor. But, as a holistic approach to a network, it would definitely lower the cost of ownership. If the client chooses to go with the WiFi as well as security from Fortinet, all from the same company - as I explained earlier, with the Security Fabric you get 100 percent visibility and threat intelligence sharing - that would definitely cut down on the cost of ownership.

Regarding ROI, especially for people in the retail business, they can easily cater to their clients, plus they can get analytic data from the clients and make something of that data.
Let's take an example where you have a big mall and the mall management decides to implement FortiWiFi. There is one feature that these guys really like which is the analytic side of it. We can easily show where their customers have been. We can show them a wireless "heat map" of everybody who walks into the mall. With it, we can tell people who own the shops, "This is where the customers mingle the most. These are the favorite parts around the mall." That really helps clients to do something with the data. That would be a good return on investment.

We're not cheap but we can give you better pricing than the competition if it comes to that. Licensing is pretty straightforward. We don't have any hidden licensing when you purchase an appliance. If you purchase one appliance you get the maximum number of clients and every feature in that appliance unlocked for you. You just pay for the entire thing outright.

In looking at Ruckus vs Fortinet Wireless and some other WiFi providers, the others are just doing the WiFi part. With Fortinet, the plus is that you also get a very secure network which is easily adaptable to the security design provided by Fortinet: the FortiGate, FortiAnalyzer, or any other feature in there. That is one of the deciding factors for organizations but, in certain cases, the fact that we can give it at a much more affordable price also helps.

Get a good wireless plan done, get a good survey done. Also, know what you really want. Every vendor comes with 100 different features but you may not end up using all those features yourself. I'm being vendor agnostic here. If you want to do a WiFi implementation: 

1. Get a proper survey done.
2. Know exactly what you want. 
3. Think about security as well.

If those three steps help you zero-in on one product, that's the way to go.

Fortinet has a very strong industrial presence because they acquired Meru Networks a couple of years ago. The industrial strength WiFi, which Fortinet is offering, is what Meru used to have. They have a couple of more technologies which the other vendors don't have.

We've seen a big jump in the market for Fortinet WiFi. We can actually provide it at a much lower cost than the competition. The plus point of our WiFi is that we don't only provide the WiFi, we also provide security with it. This relates to another problem that I see in the market. Let's take a web developer for example. The web developer is a developer who does web pages but doesn't think much about security. No matter how good a webpage is, if that page can be easily breached then it is of no use to the client. If you apply that same analogy to Fortinet, Fortinet understands security as well as wireless LAN solutions. We can easily integrate the access part of wireless with the security part of wireless. That is appreciated very much by our customers. Since they understand that, they are very happy to go with Fortinet WiFi.

I would rate Fortinet Wireless at nine out of ten because of the ROI and the TCO that we discussed, plus the ease of management. These guys they are really up on the deal. They are in the fastest moving technology industry. Whatever changes come, they implement it and do their testing very well. Overall, it's a very good product. The one feature that I am not happy about is the reporting. There's a bit of a way for them to go with that. Once they iron those things out I'm sure they'll get ten from me.