Cisco Wireless WAN Reviews

We use Cisco Wireless WAN to provide wireless WAN for our company.

I like that it's a very stable solution.

The price could be better.

I have been using Cisco Wireless WAN for more than four years.

Cisco Wireless WAN is very stable.

I think we used the smallest controller hardware solution, which was more than enough for us. But it's not scalable. It's okay because we don't have more access points.

The initial setup is straightforward. The initial deployment takes me about a day. We have to first set up the controller because it's a controller-based solution and then add access points from them. This will be determined automatically. The configuration is based on the controller and will be pushed to the access points automatically after they have been recognized.

I implemented this solution. 

The price could be better, but it's been okay. You must pay license fees for each access point connected to the controller.

I prefer the solution offered by Fortinet better.

I would tell potential users that it's a good solution if they plan to use more Cisco products. This is because it can be integrated into the entire network design.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco Wireless WAN an eight.

We trust Cisco. It's a reliable solution. Reliability is most probably the most valuable feature for our organization.

The solution does exactly what we need it to do.

The initial setup is mostly straightforward.

The pricing of the solution could always be better. If they could work to make the costs more competitive, that would be ideal.

I've been using the solution for more than ten years at this point. It's been 12 to 13 years or so. It's been a long time.

The stability of the solution is quite good. It's reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches.

The scalability potential of the solution is very good. If a company needs to expand it, they can.

If I look just now at my area and the locations I'm responsible for, we have more than 2,000 users. However, we use the product globally, and if we look at it from that perspective, we have more than 20,000 users actively using it every day. Of course, with COVID, and people now working from home, it's likely less at the moment.

I'm pretty satisfied with the documentation as well as with the support. If we have any challenges or issues, Cisco is usually always able to help us. They are helpful, knowledgeable, and responsive to our needs.

In terms of the initial implementation, it is always dependant on what knowledge you have and the level of experience. The more you have, of course, the easier it is. For us, it's not difficult anymore. I'd describe the process as pretty straightforward and quite easy to set up on a new site.

The solution does come with a price tag. It's not the least expensive option on the market.

We are a customer and end-user. We don't have a business relationship with Cisco.

We use a lot of Cisco products, including Cisco Catalyst Switches, Wireless WAN, and Cisco Nexus.

We use one of the latest access points, however, we are not up to date on the newest controller versions as our versions are still supported. We plan to replace them probably in the next one or two years. It's not the latest, let's say, controller version. However, from a software standpoint, we are still up to date.

I would recommend the solution to others. However, they have to be prepared to pay the price and have the budget for the product.

In general, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been extremely satisfied with its capabilities.

The most valuable features are user and handling capacity, indoor and outdoor access points and antennas, and the inbuilt intrusion prevention system.

The DNA space is a separate license cost, which should be included in the license.

I've been using Cisco Wireless WAN for three years.

Cisco Wireless WAN is quite stable.

This solution is scalable, but it's expensive to add licenses.

I'm satisfied with Cisco's technical support.

The ease of the setup depends on the size and design of the network. If a lot of connection points are required, then the wider controller will be needed, and branches will be connected with VPN, which makes it more complicated. 

Cisco's pricing is quite costly and should be cheaper for both licensing and hardware. A license for one access point costs around $500 for three years. There are also separate charges for smart networking and support.

I would rate Cisco Wireless WAN as nine out of ten.

We use Cisco Wireless WAN for our internal and guests users. We have recently migrated to the newest version of the solution.

The Cisco solution is good, the new GUI looks good and we are seeing more telemetry from it.

The new platform of Cisco Wireless WAN I did not like, there weren't many features available. The online platform has more options.

We found ourselves needing to integrate Cisco Wireless WAN with another Cisco product, called Cisco DNA, to try and receive more assurance on the data. It's another piece of hardware that you're putting onto your network. It could have been a cloud solution. Before Cisco, we used to have Cisco Prime which used to give us more in-depth analytics, such as heat maps of someone complaining about wireless access in a specific area. You could drill down into that, but you don't receive that information from the Cisco controller. We will receive the information if we implemented the DNAC solution, but it is another solution that we're implementing from Cisco. A competitor could probably do it in a better way reducing the need for multiple solutions.

Overall Cisco Wireless WAN could improve by giving more granular reporting and alerts back on issues and not having to integrate other tools onto the same platform. However, the platform is new, the interface is continually developing. Hopefully, they can improve quickly.

I have been using Cisco Wireless WAN for approximately 10 years.

I found the new version of Cisco Wireless WAN initially seemed to be quite buggy. However, the stability is good overall.

This model of Cisco Wireless WAN has good scalability. You can have ten of thousands of people using it.

We have approximately 4,000 users of this solution globally. The solution is used hourly.

The technical support from Cisco Wireless WAN is good. However, they were better before.

As people were transitioning to this Cisco Wireless WAN hardware, there wasn't as much available information online about different issues people might come across.

When determining if the implementation is going to be difficult it would depend on the topology of the sites. We're a global company, and on some of the sites where it was a standalone controller, it was straightforward to implement. However, on a different site when we were using the physical appliance, as a virtual wireless anchor that was in our own cloud, integrating that wasn't seamless.

We had help from the vendor when we were doing the implementation.

We have one person that does the maintenance and patching of the solution.

The price of Cisco Wireless WAN could improve upon pricing, it is expensive. We purchased the hardware through a vendor that Cisco used and we received approximately 75 percent off.

We are on a three-year license with Cisco Wireless WAN.

We evaluated the Cisco Meraki solution before we made the decision to choose the on-premise solution. One reason we choose the on-premise solution is we were already using one. When choosing which one is better, it is difficult because I did not use Cisco Meraki extensively to determine which one is best.

Since we have recently migrated to the new version of the Cisco Wireless WAN platform the interface has changed and I'm still getting used to it.

I would recommend Cisco Wireless WAN. However, that's because my exposure is to Cisco Wireless. I'm probably a little bit biased. Overall, it's a fairly good solution.

Whether this solution is suitable or not for a company depends on their deployment, if they were a Greenfield-sized company or a Brownfield-sized company I would have different tips. It does fully depend on the scenario. My key advice is with a wireless solution is for them to do a wireless survey first before purchasing.

I rate Cisco Wireless WAN an eight out of ten.

I'm a user, administrator, and implementer of Wireless WAN. I work in a large company and we use the system throughout our campus sites. We mainly use version 5508 and for smaller sites, we use 2504. There are more recent products but I don't have experience with them. We currently have 50,000 people using the Cisco Wireless WAN and have no plans for further expansion.

Improvement to our organization would be in terms of IoT, I would say, because some buildings are fully covered by WiFi. We're talking about large buildings of 60 access points per building. Users have benefited from full coverage and of course, that includes cell phones which also connect to WiFi, and using the guest wireless, and the ICP. Reduction in mobile data costs has allowed for increased savings, thanks to our corporate WiFi.

Valuable features for me would be the friendly GUI. It's not a feature as such but it's the first thing I would point out because troubleshooting is very easy on it. I can literally point down to a single host, find roughly where he's located and examine the strength of his connectivity. Also, I find the mobile anchoring to be handy although compared to the newer solutions it's a little old. 

Improvement could be made in the planning - WiFi survey and planning, and WiFi key mapping - should both be included in high-end devices. You would expect them to be included in such a product. When we bought it, 5508 was a high-end device. Some aspects could be achieved automatically by the wireless controller. For example, if there is a single access point deployed in a densely populated area, there will be many users and all those users bring down the speed. I think an option where the range of the access points is determined by the signal strength of the end-users would be good. There should be a mechanism mitigating that because when a user with a low WiFi signal connects, he basically crashes the experience for everyone else. Some automation on their part would be good.

A neat feature that some of the other vendors have is that of informing, where I can tell the access point to narrow down its signal and focus it in a specific direction. That is very handy, for example, in long corridors where you don't want the access point to spread its signal everywhere but rather focus it to a narrow field of vision, so to speak. That's a feature I would like to see. Vendors like Aruba have things like tracking mobile devices. That would also be a handy feature because it allows you to pinpoint areas that have low WiFi coverage. Another feature would be a dynamically generated heat map. Let's say you can see on a heat map where the user has been and can follow his WiFi experience in terms of signal to noise ratio, signal strength and the like as well as interference by other machines detected in that path, how the access points see each other and the strength of signal they're producing. The only thing missing is the piece of software that could show you that graphically.

I would like to see a centralized management where I don't need to log on to every controller and then proceed from there. Also, a centralized management for multiple wireless control deployments and, of course, features such as user tracking so I can pinpoint the user, all the way down to the wireless control access point and switch that the access point is connected to. 

It's a very stable device when used properly by people who know how to configure it; a high-end quality device. Recently some of the access points have started to break down but they are over 10 years old, which is quite good.

The product is very good quality with high scalability in my view.

We currently have around 10 people in our maintenance team

Prior to Cisco, we used Palo Alto. The switch was made to Cisco because we wanted to standardize the network throughout the company. 

The setup is relatively straightforward. To configure the controllers with prep time and IP address, would take a couple of hours, give or take.

I wasn't involved in the decision-making process about alternative options before we went with the Wireless WAN.

We use dedicated wireless control for our campuses in a redundant topology, active/passive. We use both Flex connect and local, essentially switched networks. Our company uses physical machines, not cloud-based wireless controls.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

Our primary use case for this solution is setting up a wireless source for our clients to connect to the VPNs and our data centers.

We have found the ability to easily increase power valuable. The solution also allows us to increase the power when it's too low.

The firewall integration is not great and should be improved.

We have been using this solution for three years.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is scalable. There are approximately 70 people using it in our organization. 

We do not have experience with customer service and support because we have not had issues.

The initial setup was straightforward, and deployment took five hours.

We implemented the solution in-house, and approximately three people are required for implementation.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. I recommend the solution to new users.

This product makes up part of our wireless network infrastructure.

The most valuable feature is the ease of configuration. Most of the questions one would have about setup are already identified in the troubleshooting guide.

The user interface is ok.

The prices are high and should be reduced in order to be more competitive.

I have been using Cisco Wireless WAN for more than five years.

In the five years that we have used it, we haven't had any problems. It has now reached end-of-life.

The scalability is very nice and we don't have any issues with it. We have about 500 users across the entire staff. They work in HR, admin, production, operations, and other roles.

The technical support is very nice and we have no issues with it.

We have traditionally used Cisco and are finally now changing because of the price.

The initial setup is okay. It takes about three months to implement.

Our in-house team handled the deployment. No maintenance is required any longer, although we have two IT people who are able to manage it.

With the increase in the price of this product, we will instead be replacing it with another vendor. It was a one-time fee and there are no costs in addition to this.

We are evaluating other solutions that are most cost-effective. Cisco is more expensive than either Aruba or SonicWall.

Whatever they have in this product is already the best in the market, and I recommend it for people who can afford it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It's for networking, specifically for network access to our Internet.

Around 50 people are using Cisco Wireless WAN in my company. They are mainly developers and the IT team.

One of the main advantages is the support Cisco offer. They provide good support, and it is easy to use.

There is room for improvement in terms of pricing.

I have been using this solution for six years. We are not using the latest version; therefore, we are exploring other potential solutions before upgrading.

I would rate stability a nine out of ten. It is quite stable.

I would rate Cisco's scalability an eight out of ten. It is a scalable product.

The initial setup is not complex, and installing the solution completely takes more than an hour.

A third-party expert, a service provider, did the deployment for Cisco Wireless WAN.

It is quite an expensive model.

I would definitely recommend using Cisco Wireless WAN.

Overall, I would rate Cisco a nine out of ten.