Cisco Meraki MG cellular gateways are a cloud managed WAN solution designed to seamlessly transpose a wireless cellular signal to wired Ethernet, providing primary or failover connectivity.
Aruba Networks Wireless WAN is an excellent solution for small to medium-sized implementation, especially on-premise. The ability to centrally manage all policy-based access requirements for both registered users as well as guests using the portal is effortless. This is backed up by good documentation which is available and excellent vendor support (HP).
We utilize it for those job site trailers, so it is perfect for a small job site where you want to provide that internet coverage to those users of those job sites, especially if they're in a remote location. We've actually even used this as the secondary internet to supplement in case the primary fiber line went down. And in my experience, we've had a site go down and use this as the backup internet and most of our users didn't even know. So as far as cons, I don't really, cost depending on the job site and your budget. That would be, I guess the only thing I would say would just justify not using it, but I don't have any reason to not use it.
It's fantastic for being in the Meraki dashboard and actually looking at quality of signal. I can look at up times, down times, ease of use when it comes to if I would have to reboot the MG 21E in case it does have a problem.
Overall reliability: since we switched to the MG 21 E, we've rarely have a problem with it when it comes to the cellular performance going down.
A DHCP configuration would be fine, but a fixed IP configuration seems to require a twist in the configuration.
If possible, it's just a subscription. With no initials and just a subscription, I think it's a "feature product" that may convince the superior even if the price is a bit high.
I am happy with wireless and all in one, but I feel that the management screen is old, so I think it is better to renew it a bit more.
We used Xirrus wifi before we moved to Aruba. Xirrus is a great niche brand that has been sold to other companies a few times in the life we used the products. This negatively impacted the product availability in our country, local support, and amount of implementation partners. Due to Aruba their broad product range, availability in the market, and knowledge with implementation partners we feel that we can build upon their products not only for a product cycle but for the decade to come.
We checked many vendors. ALU was a primary contender. However, their acccess points are not primarily designed for cellular use case. Cellular is just an additional feature on their fully loaded APs. The fact that MEraki MG is suited for this particular use case was a major factor.
In terms of scalability, The MG Meraki is unvanquished! As it works on cellular signals, as long as you have the required signal strength, you are connected. Removes the dependency on cables to connect to our ISP. So geographical locations do not affect the scalability of MG. Which is the whole point of having a Cellular to Wired Ethernet Device. And it can also be managed with the web centrally.
The ROI is excellent, over time we have been able to avoid outages even though our WAN provider may have had issues, the switch to LTE via Cisco Meraki MGwas smooth
in locations where traditional lan links were not feasible, like mobile locations, this has been a saver
they can be placed where mobile phone reception is best without LAN
