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).
Definitely well-suited for a backup for a retail environment. We have had to use it as a primary internet connection when our fiber wasn't brought in in time and we had no issues with it running. It was able to withstand the temporary load on it until we were able to get the circuit provided.
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