Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN Reviews

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.

I use it both at my home office, and we just installed it for one of our clients with about 11 different units in their building. We have been pretty impressed with it.

It has improved our organization immensely. We were using:

1. Not enough access points at one of my clients. They did not have enough.
2. They were using Ubiquiti, which was getting overloaded with traffic. Therefore, it has been a big speed improvement, as well as in coverage.

I find it very easy to manage because of the cloud management, so I can update all my buildings at once and see all of my clients from one spot. That is probably one of my favorite features, as well as it has good security with its Layer 7 protections. It has a lot of overall functionality.

At this price point, I would not mind seeing a four-way channel, instead of a 3x3 or a 4x4, like they do in the Cisco Aironet system with their other brand. For the same price point in this other Cisco brand, it is a lot cheaper, and you can get a slightly better throughput than you can with these. It does not have the cloud-base. This would be something that I would like to see, and they do have it in their bigger units, just not at the price point we were at for the MR 42s.

So far, there have not been any issues. 

The only ones that we did have were with some wiring in the building. 

The products were fine. The only time they have gone down is when they first had to do firmware updates. It has only been three weeks, but so far, they have worked very well.

I have not had any issues with scalability. If we need any more, it is literally just plug and play. It will immediately go in the network, because it is cloud-based. Everything from the network is on the cloud, so it just pushes right into the new device.

I have not yet talked to technical support. 

I talk to our rep if I have any questions because I have a direct Cisco rep.

We had Ubiquiti UniFi and the standard APs. They were not the ACs; they were the standard APs. Their coverage was always rough. We had a lot of dropouts due to speed issues, and this particular client of mine was putting in a new system in their building, and we knew this was going to push the WiFi really hard. Therefore, we knew we would have to upgrade it when we put the system in.

It was very straightforward. I did all the setup on it.

If you are wondering if Meraki can work for you, contact one of their representatives because they will do onsite trials where you can set up their system. If it does not work, you can send it back to them for no charge.

We were looking at improving the system that we currently had with Ubiquiti. We also did consider Ruckus and Cisco (the standard Cisco units). 

The reason I went with Meraki was mainly for its ease of setup and control of multiple locations, which this client has. It will allow me to integrate another system very quickly, as we continue expanding for them. Being an offsite vendor, and having remote access into it, the simplicity of that made a big difference in choosing their system.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The device needs to hold up to what they are telling me it can do. I want to see good throughput from it, as well as that it has security and protection. 

Usability is a big one. How simple it is, easy it is to set up, use, and for the client to understand. Finally, it would be the technical support. They have to have a good technical support base.

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.

Negotiate the deal put in front of you!

The Dashboard, with its centralized "cloud" interface is the most valuable feature of Meraki. If you are a smaller organization, have a small IT staff, and/or basic wireless needs Meraki provides the perfect solution. That is not to say that larger more educated organizations might not also find Meraki to be a great fit.

We use Meraki as a managed service provider for several clients that found the product and price a fit for their organization.

One of the virtues of the product could possibly be viewed as an achilles heel. The product is straightforward and does not have lots of features and fine tuning available vendors such as Cisco and Aruba. Some may be available when unlocked by Meraki TAC, but the product is not as feature rich as non-cloud offerings. This may be viewed as a positive by many users that do not want the complexity that comes with the extra features.

I have been certified and used this product for 3 years.

Very few issues. TAC works well with standard requests. If one needs something very advanced and rarely needed the TAC has difficulty escalating quickly.

The product is completely stable in our implementations.

The Meraki products scale quite well by allowing multiple organization with subdivisions of "networks" APs can be added to networks and tagged with other information as well. I would say that it works best for organizations with many diverse locations with smaller numbers of APs.

I would say that customer service is an 8/10

For basic technical support I give a 9/10. Once in the BETA program Irate Meraki a 10/10. The area in between basic support and "white glove" BETA program support is a little rough as I think most Meraki users keep things simple.

My company implements Cisco and Meraki and are certified for both. As I am also Aruba certified we occasionally service Aruba implementations.

Setup is very straightforward. The GUI is very intuitive.

We are the vendor doing the implementation and often maintenance/monitoring.

Pricing is directly tied to licensing. Longer terms are a better value than shorter ones, but the customer needs to determine which options is best.

yes we evaluated all the competition.