Cisco Wireless Reviews

The main disadvantage of Cisco Wireless is its cost - it's expensive. Its interface is not easy. However, I like it since I am an engineer. 

I have been using the product for ten years. 

I find the tool to be 99 percent stable.

Meraki is more scalable than Cisco Wireless.

For Cisco Wireless installation, we usually need two people. The whole deployment takes about one day. Maintenance is good for engineers, but I'm unsure about regular users. It's easy, but we need about four people to maintain the product.

I rate the tool's pricing a nine out of ten. 

I prefer Aruba over Cisco Wireless. It is cheaper and easier to deploy, and the Aruba system is easier to install than Cisco solutions. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

We provide solutions to a university and Cisco Wireless is one of them. 

The solution offers central management, reliability, and signal, ensures the bandwidth, and segregates the network. It also maintains the authentication process in the compass solution, which is good regarding multiple software.

The solution should introduce natural language troubleshooting processes. It will identify possible problems or errors due to the symptoms.

The product is stable.

I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

The solution is good for expansion. We cater the solution to enterprise businesses.

I rate the solution’s scalability a seven out of ten.

Sometimes, the solution has lingering issues with the other dependencies.

Neutral

The initial setup is a bit complex. It depends on the project size and requirements. It takes almost a day, excluding the infrastructure part.

I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

Cisco’s pricing is top ranking in the market and the competition out of 300 products. It is moderate. Cisco Wireless has a complex licensing model. While some features are offered without a license for integration and central management, others require licensing for activation. SmartNet support and other tools are also necessary, adding to the complexity. Segregating the costs into one-time payments for integration licenses and separate payments for SmartNet could reduce overall costs.

We recommend Cisco for enterprise customers because they are already invested in Cisco solutions. Once the setup is complete, they can utilize existing accessories. Additionally, Cisco provides fantastic support and robust product features, making it a reliable, high-performance solution for network needs.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use the solution because we consistently upgrade the laptops and desktops to ensure synchronization with the SIP set.

All the features of the solution are good. The enterprise environment seamlessly integrates with Cisco Wireless.

The solution's pricing should be improved.

I have contacted customer service and support about licenses and other technical aspects. I have not faced any issues.

In my latest company, we use Aruba Networks and Cisco Wireless on-site. We use Aruba for IPs on Azure, while Cisco Wireless is used on Azure as well due to the high cost of data processing. For Aruba, we use models like the 5747 and the latest 370 series. In addition, there are other services like the 7200 controller and the 5700 series used across various rooms.

The pricing is a bit high, and I would rate it a six on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most expensive.

The solution is good for our environment. Overall, I rate it a perfect ten.

I use Cisco Wireless for education as I am managing a school. We use it for connectivity for students and teachers. It is an international private school. This is why we have to get high speed connectivity.

I have not used the solution for enough time to give a full evaluation but I will tell you the estimate - I estimate that it will reduce the time for a student to do their work and reduce the time for copying and transferring data through the local network. That's the reason that what we needed to get this hardware.

The features that I have found most valuable with Cisco Wireless is that the average connectivity for this WIFI access point is 2.5 gigabytes. That's the highest technology and highest connectivity. They started using the new technology and WIFI to get you a faster connectivity. All companies jumped from Wave 2 to WIFI 6 for the high speed.

I selected Cisco Wireless because I found they improved everything, but there is still a gap in Cisco reporting. It did not invest more into giving accurate reports. That's the missing thing in the solution. 

In the next release, they should add a better reporting feature. The reporting will tell you if you have a problem. That will make the diagnostics easier. Although, we have not had problems that required a lot of diagnostics.

I just implemented the Cisco Wireless WiFi 6 last weekend.

I would be liar if I answered if it is stable because it has only been up for two days.

But the Cisco solution overall, and Cisco Wireless generally, are 100% stable.

It is scalable. We have around 2000 students and teachers using it because we are an educational institution.

I'm the IT manager. My role as IT manager is managing the whole technology results.

We require three staff people for deployment and maintenance of Cisco Wireless - a network administrator and two IT specialists.

They are good.

I have been using the Cisco solution since 2011.

The initial setup right now of the access points to the WIFI, and to the switches are managed by FortiGate firewall and the wireless controller. So the routing is through the FortiGate firewall and the activity is through the Cisco switches managed through the wireless controller.

The plan was to upgrade the firewall and remove the old non-supported access point from the system because I used hybrid between these two and WIFI 6. Because this hardware is very expensive to get all at one time, we have a plan to replace all access points for these.

The development takes three days. But the delivery takes a long time. They take a lot of time to deliver hardware. 

We implemented with a Cisco partner. They were experts. They did all they were supposed to do and it was active within the time as planned.

Two days is not enough to see ROI.

But for the previous experience, yes, I can see ROI. The old access points stayed with us since 2015. I have some working since 2017. I removed some from the system, so I have all 2017 access points still working. That is quite a reliable system.

Any people who are looking to get a stable solution with and long life and long time connectivity should go with Cisco.

The big lesson is that when you invest in expensive hardware, you have to understand that it should be a trusted hardware to give you stability and to make sure that your investment will be returned soon. The cost of implementation and downtime with Cisco are less than with other solutions.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Cisco Wireless a nine.

We work at a courthouse, however, we manage the data for the entire county. We have them at the Sheriff's office. They use them in commissary purchases, which is a separate SSI and separate VLAN. That's to segregate wireless traffic for different groups of people per their needs. 

We have lawyers that maybe need to reach back into the network and access their documents when they take a laptop to the courtroom with them. And so through that, we've done some radius authentication. Therefore, it's not just an SSI ID. They actually have to log in with credentials as well. 

Then, we have a guest SSID just for general public access, and that's basically running wide open. We do have a simple password audit, however, everybody knows it, and that's separated by VLAN as well and run through Palo Alto. We also have a whole different SSID for patrol units for the Sheriff's office, where they upload car videos and update their car computers wirelessly. We use it broadly. 

The solution has let us get network access to more people in different locations where wires aren't feasible - like in a garage or for the Sheriff's office uploads in courtrooms. In some of these courtrooms, you can't run additional wire due to the fact that they're historical buildings. You have to have wireless. Also, you have lawyers walking around and you don't want them tripping over stuff. It's useful in every aspect of getting public access - even for when there are events in the square, across from the courthouse. It's basically helped us better serve everybody and provided them with network access.

It always runs, and it's very reliable in terms of performance. They are very, very robust, very rugged, and can handle indoor or outdoor coverage. We typically don't have too many problems with the hardware.

The wireless LAN controllers at the time when we started rolling out, we went with it simply due to the fact that everything else worked that was Cisco. We figured, if everything else works and we're satisfied with it, let's go that route. However, now people want more access points and more spots. And if you give everybody coverage, the cost is crazy high. You can either say, "No, we can't," or you can go with the cheaper product, even slightly cheaper, plus you get more APs out there for more coverage.

At least with the WLC 2500 that we've been using, you can't take just the stock AP from them. You have to use lightweight firmware. You turn it into a lightweight AP and then you can join it to, or provision it to, the wireless controller, which should be automatic. In most cases, it works pretty well, however, it's still not there yet, as far as plugging it into this network that's going to tunnel back to the controller. I would say it works 7 out of 10 times. For the price, it should be a 10 out of 10. Especially with Cisco running an entire Cisco network with CDP all over the place, there should be no reason it doesn't tunnel back every single time. And yet, there are a few times where it doesn't.

It got to the point where, when I prevent in APs, I just take them directly to the switch that the controller is plugged into and provision them there instead of just plugging them in like you should be able to. 

The software on offer is not great. Cisco lacks in software updates, surprisingly. They don't update their firmware too much for the controller. This is not something you want to be done constantly as it does make downtime, however, I would like to see them more than once a year. Unless there's a critical flaw, or you're running an early release. They're their main releases, I want to say year after year, it's been maybe once a year, and then you have to push it out to all your APs. 

Their software's really clunky. It's not very user-friendly, which you can see that as a good thing and a bad thing. We should learn this stuff, but at the same time, it shouldn't be overly difficult. You shouldn't have your options hidden in menus. You shouldn't have to go 25 minutes deep to get to some security options for a specific SSID. 

Also the way the group their security settings is a little bit backward to me. It's not done by SSID. There's just a security tab. Then, you have to link back and forth through that. However, that's something that you're going to fight with through every controller, every different type of device. We all wish they were organized differently. 

We originally started using the solution in 2014.

We had one before then as well. Since we've gone wireless, or implemented wireless throughout the buildings here, we've always used Cisco. This is just a Cisco shop. 

The solution is extremely stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The one issue we did have was with their mesh radios. I'm not sure that it was with the radio itself, the software in the radio. They run two different firmware. One is autonomous firmware, which they use with their AP line and then lightweight APs. With the autonomous one, there's no consistency there. For the indoor APs, you'll have lightweight firmware that you need on them. And then for the outdoor mesh radios, they're not fully autonomous, yet you have to have the autonomous software on them for the mesh feature to function. That's a little bit convoluted and I kind of wished that would just have it one way or the other.

The solution scales easily.

The number of users varies. Some days we have court cases and then you have jurors, lawyers, the media people. It varies widely. I would say on average, we have possibly 200 people a day on a slow day using it. And then on an extremely busy day, it could double that.

We use the solution quite extensively.

We do plan to increase usage, however, it won't necessarily be with this product. We'll probably like to go with a different product based on price and licensing.

Technical support is 10 out of 10. Cisco tech support is one of the best supports I've ever dealt with.

The initial setup was very straightforward. As we have added SSIDs, when we have had a hardware failure, the re-setup, for instance, is a bit more involved. When the controller itself was acting kind of finicky, we did an overnight request and got one in. Re-uploading that configuration was not as easy if that makes sense. If you're setting up a brand new device, it's very easy, very straightforward. If you're trying to restore from a backup configuration, it's not as easy. We ended up actually just resetting it up from scratch.

The deployment itself likely took three hours.

We had some bugs to work out after that, however, the majority of it was up and running within three hours.

For maintenance, you only need one person (a network admin) and then a backup person, just in case that person is on vacation or something.

We handled the setup all in-house. We do have their tech support. At one point, we did get tech on the phone and were working with them. It basically came down to firmware. The one they shipped us could not downgrade its firmware to the firmware we were running on. There was no good way to make it upload the config from an older firmware. They wanted the same firmware restorations. That was kind of a pain, however, we just ended up manually going through and resetting everything, which was not too terrible.

Cisco's APs are licensed and you need to buy them. Basically, for every AP, you have to have a license. Some of the other devices do it so that they support X amount and you can buy the licenses for zero to 20, 20 to 40, et cetera, and it's a little bit more affordable. That's kind of why I was trending towards Ruckus. They handle their licensing a little bit differently. 

Every time somebody asks "How much is a wireless access point? We need wireless in this room." Well, then you tell them the cost and mention "Oh yeah, and there's a license." It's expensive.

Users purchase each AP, and that's until the end of that product's life. If you break it down over a year, it's fairly affordable. However, nobody replaces one AP, we replace them all typically at the same time. Unless one dies or they need one expanded, as far as specific costs go, it's different for indoor and outdoor ones. It might be around $100 for a license. The internal ones are far cheaper than that. 

We had looked at Meraki before, however, the cost is just astronomical. We're a local government, so there's no money. The cost of Cisco wireless controllers has always been kind of clunky. I had heard a lot of good things about Aruba, and then I heard they were bought out by HP, however, it seems like it's still good. I was leaning more towards Ruckus based on just how it handles traffic and handles the guest VLANs and that it can do SSI de-scheduling. I still need to go back and do an in-depth read on the Ruckus option. I am leaning towards that one, even though it seems like it's a close tie.

I also looked at Ubiquity, however, from what I've read, their hardware is not really up to par when you hit saturation, and on certain days of the week here, we definitely have saturated APs due to the fact that we have court cases. You can go from the usual 10 people on an AP to possibly 40 plus people, all trying to check their internet over the wireless. It gets kind of crazy on those days.

We're just a customer and an end-user.

We use the 2500 wireless controller and all the APs that go with it. 

We have Cisco switches and routers as well. We were using Cisco firewalls up until about three years ago. And then we switched to Palo Alto. As far as switching goes, still happy with their switches. They're extremely pricey, however, they last forever, and they meet a lot of government requirements that we have.

I'd recommend the solution I wouldn't hesitate to do install it if the company can afford it.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten for its ease of setup, ease of scalability, and robustness.

Our primary use case is for a guest portal type of scenario where different types of users can connect. We use SAML authentication for that. We are customers of Cisco via a third-party vendor and I'm a network specialist.

It's valuable to us that creating policies is simple. We use Cisco ISE and it works well with the product. 

I've found that the media stream and Mojo settings are not sufficiently supported. The other issue we have is that when the access point goes down, we don't get any indication of the reason. This has to be fine-tuned so that a trigger is sent to the Cisco Server or any third-party server, and we get the alerts. I'd really like to see bug-free software.

I've been using this solution for over a year. 

Stability could be improved but it's not bad. 

The solution is easy to scale and if you have the latest wireless controller, you can really extend the coverage and extend the APs.

Technical support is awesome, we're very satisfied. 

I know that Aruba is better than Cisco, they really need to improve things. 

We carried out the implementation ourselves and it was quite straightforward. It took around six to eight months to implement the entire solution, install access points, configure and fine-tune. There's no specific maintenance required, it's mostly the operational aspect, upgrading software, and hardware support. We currently have around 6,000 users. 

Cisco is a bit pricey compared to other vendors like Ruckus which have pretty decent pricing. If a customer asks me for a cost-effective solution, I may go with Huawei but if it's in the enterprise dev environment, then I'd go with Cisco, Aruba, or Ruckus as a third choice.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

There are some features I would like to have in Cisco Wireless, such as Telemetry and other IoT. However, they are available in the new version of the solution.

I have been using Cisco Wireless for approximately 15 years.

Cisco Wireless solutions are highly scalable.

The solution is highly scalable. I have about 60 access points and it is scalable with a thousand access points.

The technical support from Cisco is good.

The initial setup of Cisco Wireless is easy.

The process involves taking the Cisco Wireless device and adding it to the network. You connect the device to the controller, and then the controller can be configured. It's very quick and easy.

The price of Cisco Wireless equipment is expensive.

Cisco has introduced a subscription pricing model where you have to always pay and renew.

I plan to change to a Catalyst 9800 next year.

If companies already have Cisco wireless infrastructure, the deployment of this solution will be easy.

I rate Cisco Wireless a nine out of ten.

The support from Cisco is always excellent. It's often better than other options, including Aruba.

The product has so many features. If there are maybe a hundred features, a typical organization may only need 60 or 65 at maximum. There's a wide variety of options to choose from.  

The stability is great. It's very reliable. 

You can do multiple layers with the new OS that Cisco offers. 

The new OS streamlines the Cisco offering and it's been very good. 

The solution can scale well.

Cisco moved from the 5000 series, which was a different OS, to a newer OS, right. The 9800, for example, practically improved how a wireless switch or wireless controller should work, which was not so good in terms of Cisco in the earlier versions. It's improved a lot, however, if you are using older versions, you are on a different OS, and it's not as good as it is now. 

Older versions used to be hard to deploy. The latest OS, however, has made things a lot easier. While deployment is much better, it could always be even easier. 

The interface could be improved. 

I've been using the solution for five years or so. We used it for a while, then left it, then came back to it. 

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

The scalability is nice. 

We have about 10,000 to 12,000 or so users on the solution right now. 

I'm not sure if we plan to increase usage. We are already 100% covered. 

Technical support from Cisco is very good. It's always been much better than its competitors in this regard. We are quite satisfied with how helpful and responsive they continue to be. There is no equivalent on the market. They simply will not let you down.

I currently also use Aruba. I also have worked with Extreme. 

There are very similar devices and have the same features for the most part. Both are stable and excellent in terms of capabilities. Cisco, however, does offer better support.

The initial setup is now pretty straightforward. Cisco came out with a new OS that streamlined everything - including the initial setup. Where Aruba used to be easier (in terms of implementation), Cisco, with its newest updates, has very much improved and they are neck and neck in terms of ease of setup.

I can get a Cisco network up and running n 30 minutes. If someone knows how a Cisco controller works, I am sure, even with the HA, that person can build one full working controller within one hour. For me, in a lab set up with a virtual machine, in a maximum of 30 minutes, I can bring it up and make a small network work. Within one hour I can do that setup.

I can handle the initial setup myself using the GUI for the controller. 

We don't really see Cisco as a solution that provides an ROI. It's more of a required service for us. 

The licensing is usually for an average of three years, depending on what we buy.

There may be some add-ons that could cost a bit more. 

While, typically, Cisco is a little bit more costly, the costs also depend on your relationship with Cisco.

I'm a customer and an end-user.

We are using versions six and eight, a mix of both.

We tend to use the on-premises deployment model as we are in healthcare and there are restrictions on what we can do with the cloud and what we cannot do with the cloud.

For those considering the solution, I'd advise them to make sure the support is good in their area or for the solution you choose and that there are knowledgeable people around so that if there are any issues, they can be addressed. 

I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.