Alternatives to Ubiquiti AP's?

T

The Spyder

2[H]4U
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Jun 18, 2002
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After several months of troubleshooting, RMA's, and different products- I am tossing in my hat. There seems to be no solution to the bug we are encountering. The Unifi line has issues with areas of dense radio noise and the current gen Macbook Air/iPad/RMBP. I need to buy 4 new AP's. We have 50 users at one office and 10 at the second. What have you used and what do you recommend?

Cisco 1041N AIR-AP1041N-A-K9
EnGenius EAP9550?
HP?
Aruba?
Meraki?
 
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What are your needs? Do you need POE (802.11af or is passive okay), mimo, dual band etc etc etc
 
I've heard some good things about Aruba but have not had any hands on with them yet. We have their controller less setups in some clients and they seem to be pretty solid.
 
Meraki will send you a free demo unit after a short video conference. I've been very impressed with mine.
 
Sorry to hear that you are having density issues with UniFi. I have a small school with 10 UniFi Pro's with a concurrent load of 100 devices, soon to go up to 160. All devices are Macbooks and iPhones with iPads coming online shortly.


The Cisco 1040 and the Cisco 1140 series are end of life. I would look into the Cisco 1600 series, specifically the AIR-SAP1602I-x-K9.
 
Aruba is pricey, but their support is great. Their interoperability features are phenomenal as well.
 
RocketTech said:
Meraki will send you a free demo unit after a short video conference. I've been very impressed with mine.
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The Meraki stuff is pretty slick and I WAS a partner pre-Cisco. Been through other Cisco buyouts with other products before, and as much as they swore that it won't be folded under the Cisco envelope, it inevitably will. Then they exclude all non-Cisco partners.

From an end-user perspective, the only downfall is a required maintenance for the life of the product. All management is done via cloud interface, and access to that requires maintenance.
 
Nate7311 said:
From an end-user perspective, the only downfall is a required maintenance for the life of the product. All management is done via cloud interface, and access to that requires maintenance.
Click to expand...

Wasn't aware of that. I don't have to pay to access mine.
 
RocketTech said:
Meraki will send you a free demo unit after a short video conference. I've been very impressed with mine.
Click to expand...

I got one of these also, it's a very cool unit with lots of features. My clients though just don't operate in the spending bracket to pay 150 per unit per year to configure wifi.
 
The Spyder said:
After several months of troubleshooting, RMA's, and different products- I am tossing in my hat. There seems to be no solution to the bug we are encountering. The Unifi line has issues with areas of dense radio noise and the current gen Macbook Air/iPad/RMBP. I need to buy 4 new AP's. We have 50 users at one office and 10 at the second. What have you used and what do you recommend?

Cisco 1041N AIR-AP1041N-A-K9
EnGenius EAP9550?
HP?
Aruba?
Meraki?
Click to expand...

If you'll gimme a deal on the 4, I'll take them.
 
dave99 said:
I think the free ones from the webinar come with 3 year maint.
Click to expand...

Yup, I have three year. Dunno that this effectively different from most other top-tier network companies. Licensing/maintenance/support agreements are always a good detail to know before they bite you.
 
As an admin of a very large Aruba deployment, I have nothing but good things to say about them. They get more expensive the more things you want the APs to do, detect, etc. I like the fact that if the AP isn't being used, it automatically goes into Air Monitor mode to be a wifi detector and rogue signal analyzer. They offer full encrypted GRE tunnels back to the controller for security. I've used the AP-125, 135, 85, 175, RAP 2, RAP 5, and the 3000/6000 series controllers. Airwave is good with it and so is clearpass/amigopod. Their support is excellent. Have not been dissatisfied with Aruba....ever....though watch out for switching to FIPS mode...it wipes out your config. Yes, it is documented I found out...in BOLD in the documentation.

I also use Ubiquiti for my side consulting gigs...and have always been a fan. I use them at my house as well, so that has some stock for me in what I think about them.
 
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Hi,

In Portugal we have deploy several thousand Motorola AP's, in the last 5 years.
Have you see Motorola AP6521?
With one Ap as a controller you can have more 23 equal under that controller.
At this moment we dont have any issues with this AP's.
 
Thanks for all the suggestions.

The day I posted this, my 802.11AC AP showed up. We put it into service that next week and I'll be damned if it did not fix our problem. I believe it's solely because of the channel change (and possibly because we lost the two adjacent renters.)

I'm taking a risk and ordering two more to replace the Pro's. I also found two NIB pro's sitting on a shelf I had no idea about. I may end up selling a 3 pack and two individuals.
 
I'm interested in buying out your Unifi gear if you need to get rid of it. PM me if so. Pros, UAPS, ACs, anything....

As for other vendors, I'd say Meraki if the budget allows. They make some seriously good products, just higher priced then what I'd expect to pay for non-Cisco enterprise gear (but now Meraki is Cisco anyways.... :rolleyes: )
 
Aerohive is a little spendy but for good reason, you get good support and product.

I have a few Aerohive networks that are running 600 plus devices on 12 AP's. I haven't had a single issue with slowness or loss of signal even in dense area's.

Of course I am a reseller of Aerohive but I am not biased, I like Meraki as well.
 
Aruba instant AP's. Get a sales guy and beat him up for great pricing. I got the Aruba rep to go lower than Cisco for 105's. Great APs, put them in a dev environment that each of 30 devs had a G radio on their desk broadcasting at the same time.
 
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