Alcatel-Lucent OmniAccess Wireless Access Points vs. Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers

One of best use cases for using OmniAccess Wire Access Point is where we have dense no. of users as client associated capacity is very good. Also one of the use case is when administrator wants different PSK for each user for authentication. OmniAccess WAP supports in better way.

I think any size organization can benefit from them. The smaller "L" models work well for a smaller organization and of course, the same answer for the larger platforms. The failover/redundancy options are quite nice and the unified setup and UI is always nice for consistency.

Incentivized

• Flexibility in terms of deployment, management
• Better security feature
• Application awareness ,WIPS
• DPSK
• Better client associated count

• I think the updates are great. ISSU upgrading code is fantastic. I think the speed with which CAPWAP converges or reconverges, I think the redundancy mechanisms for roaming APs to other controllers is very good. I think overall, getting away from more of a monolithic processor where subprocesses handle what they call the WNCD tasks, I think fundamentally is an improvement in performance.
• The radioactive tracing, all of the troubleshooting and all of the logging and all of the importing and exporting features for logging and analytics within the controller itself is really, really good compared to the predecessor AireOS.

Incentivized

• No of Interfaces
• must have a variety in terms of MIMO
• better throughput

• The only downside I would say is the GUI performance is a little bit slow, even with a newer 9800, performance still lags a bit even compared to the previous generations. So I would like to see that improved. But aside from that, that's really the only issue that we have with it.

Incentivized

Despite common software and hardware issues this is still the best product on the market for large scale enterprise deployments. Cisco has worked with us extensively to reduce the amount of bugs in every iteration however new bugs are introduced or new incompatibilities always arise with major releases. Thus, while I'm hesitant to recommend the product it's still much better than all the other competitors such as Aruba and Juniper in the WIFi space. There is also extensive integration with DNAC/Catalyst Center and ISE in an SDA deployment. Recently there has been a number of critical issues with the controller software and Cisco has proved themselves to be incapable of timely troubleshooting and diagnosis. This has reduced our confidence in the product and it's current and future stability and maintainability. At it's current state the product is taking up too much of our engineering resources to maintain despite also paying for premium support from Cisco. As such I have reduced by rating as we are likely to look at alternative vendors for our long-term wireless management solution

Incentivized

It's not simple, but this is the result of being very deeply configurable

Incentivized

Due to our HA set up we have always managed to access our wireless networks without problems, when issues occur. When we have lost access to the GUI, due to internal network problems, console access is always welcomed and brings with it the normal Cisco CLI syntax. From previous versions of CLI, it is now a lot simpler and reflects other Cisco products, making it easier to troubleshoot and navigate when necessary.

Incentivized

Monitoring is very good Seamless integration with Cisco ISE RRM configuration very easy. It has REST API support IOS-XE is very powerful operation system. Multicasting and mDNS features are really good and very easy to configure. It supports Pyats and Genie so getting constructed data from python script calls very helpful.

Incentivized

When it's a config issue, TAC is usually useful. If it's some bug and BU needs to be involved, it might take forever.

Incentivized

You need to understand wifi basics

Incentivized

Have used Cisco Meraki access point earlier having management on cloud and is on license (subscription basis). But Alcatel OmniAccess Points have management on cloud, on premise as well which means to say flexibility in terms of management. We had one requirement where we number of user is large which is going to connect on access point but Cisco Meraki only supports 200 users per radio whereas OmniAccess point have better client associated capacity with 524 per radio.

Ubiquiti WLAN is very much a consumer platform. It is not production ready, it is buggy, it has issues. It is cheaper than Cisco, but you get what you pay for. Aruba doesn't integrate nicely with our existing largely Cisco based networks, so when time came to replace AireOS, the Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers came out on top.

Incentivized

There are different vesrions for different requirements, there's HA as well.

Incentivized

• Better Roaming
• Ease of Management
• Better performance

• Positive impacts, yeah, is good to have a central location to control all these profiles for different countries and locations. And the drawback, like I said to you really because of the too many integrations that have a dependency on the software version. For example, Cisco ONE for Access have certain software that can run through and then this scatter center need to make sure it's working with the others APS version that is currently working. And we also, the Cisco Catalyst Center also have some kind another version of software that you need to support this controller. So it's like two tier three tiers of the software version that we need to match. Then only it can work.

Incentivized