Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN Reviews

The flexibility, since it's a cloud service, is the most valuable feature of this solution. As well as:  

• The administration 
• Management of the whole platform 
• Development
• Deployment options in the cloud

There is only one particular thing that needs improvement. Sometimes, for example, when you need to open a ticket, although it's under the umbrella of Cisco, you still need to go to the Meraki support. We had issues with Cisco in general. We have multiple platforms from Cisco but when it came to Meraki, we thought to go to another support team to open a case. That's something that might be improved. My opinion and recommendation would be that when you open a case at Cisco, Meraki should be irrelevant. You should have the same support experience just as we have with Cisco.

In the next release, they should improve the way that you engage support. Once you engage them, they are quite knowledgeable and they are okay. There's no issue with that. 

It's stable. In terms of our users, we have guest users and such. It might be that on a particular day we have about a thousand clients and devices connected to the platform.

It's scalable. 

The technical support is good. We never had any particular dispute. From the technical point of view, the technical support is fine. The only thing is the thing that although it's Cisco, you have Meraki dashboards. 

We did have another wireless solution that was made up of bits and pieces from different vendors and obviously Meraki was one of the vendors that integrated everything together. So you had one platform from one supply manufacturer. That's a big plus for them.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. As always in technology, you have difficulties. It was normal on the second deployment because it was in phases. You will always have failures but that's normal.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten and would recommend it. 

We primarily use the solution for our customers.

The solution is easy for deployments. As we are an integrator, we sometimes have several levels separating the customer and our work. With this solution, the customer can look at his environment, and we also have the right to monitor it and to configure it if we need to from our end.

The functionalities are quite professional and complete. It offers good integration with other Meraki products, like switches and the firewall. You can get an overview of all networks and the host. It's really great; nobody else can do that.

Some operations can be quicker within the solution. When it is deployed and registered on Meraki cloud, when you move, for example, a device from one customer to another, you need to un-claim the device from Customer A, and then claim it to Customer B. This process can take one hour. If they could shorten this time to about 10 minutes or so, that would be ideal.

The commercial version of the solution could be cheaper.

The stability of the solution is good. It's stable almost all of the time. We haven't experienced any crashes or anything of that nature.

The solution is scalable. It's very easy. If a company grows, we just have to do a few clicks and it's ready.

Technical support is good. We're satisfied with them so far. They're very interactive, knowledgable, and quick. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

We're an integrator. We handle the implementation ourselves. Sometimes we may need support from Meraki directly for very specific keys and some expertise, but it's very rare.

The price is quite high, but it does have higher functionalities as well. You pay a lot, but you get a good product. Still, it could potentially be 10-15% cheaper than it is.

We pay a yearly subscription. It's my understanding that you can pay for one, two, three or five-year subscriptions. There aren't any fees above that.

We use the public cloud deployment model. 

I'd recommend the solution. It does depend on what the organization needs, however.

I'd rate it nine out of ten.

We primarily create outdoor usage of city-wide networks. It's mostly for visitors to the city and students at the university.

Multiple access ID capabilities, meshing, and the quality of the product itself are all valuable features.  

Unfortunately, we have to deal with European privacy laws and as far as we can see, the solution is not compliant with these. It's why we're not able to continue with Cisco Meraki. They need to become compliant with GDPR laws.

They should make the solution more transparent so we can better see what the system does.

The solution is stable. We haven't had issues with the hardware.

The solution is scalable.

Sometimes it takes a while for technical support to get back to you and their suggestions have been inaccurate occasionally. However, largely we're satisfied with technical support. The time they gave us inaccurate information, the situation was related to an HD problem of GDPR security. The answers provided were not accurate for countries in Europe.

The initial setup is straightforward but we've had a lot of experience with the solution. An installation of an average of five to 10 units takes half a day to a full day.

We handled the implementation ourselves.

We work mainly with small and medium enterprises. We deploy the MR72 and 73 versions of the solution.

In general, the solution performs well in Europe, but it doesn't comply with the GDPR, so we're not allowed to use it.

I'd rate it eight out of ten.

It's a cloud-managed network, which makes it easy to manage and to configure. You can configure the access points before it reaches your offices and can configure it through serial numbers. You can add the serial number of the access point and the Meraki dashboard. It's easy.

In a future release, they should offer a next-generation UTM, where you can manage all items and the network, and have it include a lot of security features like fingerprinting functionality.

The solution is very stable. It is a very manageable and secure system.

The technical support is very good. They reply immediately.

I work with various versions of the solution, including MR32, MR33 and MR42. We're a reseller of the solution. We typically handle enterprise-level clients.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We use our Meraki system to provide new IOD access and internal access for wifi devices.

It provides an easy login page for most students.

In terms of wireless network visibility, we have a lot more insight into what students are doing now. We can track down peer to peer very quickly and can just lock it down. If we find an offender that gets caught with the law, we can direct the authorities directly to them.

The solution also reduced our false positives by about 50%, as well as saves us time, money, and administrative work.

The management and upgrades are very simple and straightforward.

Traffic analytics give us insight, but they don't decrypt anything.

I would be interested in seeing more enterprise-level, advanced user features.

Technical support can be improved, as well as having more detailed capabilities to go without using an API.

I would rate scalability as five out of ten. It's kind of hard to say.

Their technical support is hit or miss.

The wifi solution that we had before wasn't great so we had to go with something else.

It's a pretty good value, but not great. Pricing is on a yearly basis for the Meraki solution.

The biggest lesson we've learned is that wifi systems are very complicated. My advice is to be sure you understand the depth that the system gives you.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten. It's a pretty solid solution. It lacks the advanced features that I would like to see to do proper wireless engineering, but it's a pretty solid solution.

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. 

I love the ease of deployment and the dashboard. These are the the main selling points of this solution.

It improved the installation time. It's very easy to get an overview without the expensive monitoring software because you can get it more of less for free with the dashboard. You get a lot of insights out of the box.

It's performing well, really well. We don't have any issues. We only have issues if there is a lot of rogue APs in the neighborhood and that not Meraki's fault.

There are many improvements that can be made. Mainly in the radio parts, they need to include some more features but it is hard to say exactly what we want. We had have a few cases where we could not use Meraki because it could not do advanced routing features, and so on, but it is very unlikely that Meraki would include that in the next releases. We have tried to push it because we are quite a big reseller in the Nordic region.

I would say overall it's really stable. When they realize features, it looks like it is well tested and they don't just release them to release a new feature and if it's a better feature they write it as beta so please be careful.

The scalability is more or less endless. I have not seen problems with adding 100's or 1000's of devices.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

We always think it is best to consider:

• Management
• Price
• Including new technologies

The price can be negotiated.

For big enterprise, I would definitely use Meraki. They are doing something really special stuff.

Our environment consists of five locations and we are using the Meraki APs in all of them for user/guest WiFi access.

This product has allowed us to easily create custom SSIDs for clients and carve out the necessary bandwidth for clients needs.

• Ease of use
• Central management
• Pretty reliable devices

I also really love their cloud-based dashboard which allows me to see all my locations in one place.

I believe every product always has room for improvement. When it comes to Meraki I would like to see them improve their support where an assigned engineer can take the case all the way to closure. Usually, you get a different engineer calling regarding the same ticket.