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).
Cisco Meraki MG smplifies the route to wireless WAN connectivity and makes cellular a really good uplink option for many networks. MG21 can be used best as gateway to cellular networks, by converting LTE signal from a cellular provider to an ethernet handoff, which can be used as an internet uplink for a variety of use-cases.
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.
Although both products come from the same family, there are drastic differences between them. When it comes to the MX, it's all about security. It might not perform like the latter, but the security it provides is really good. It is a good enterprise WAN Solution, but still, the Meraki MG beats it in overall performance & ease of use. And the MX sadly doesn't support cellular connectivity.
I really think that Cisco Meraki MG is an excellent product that can be used in any part of the organization when you need a backup uplink solution. As it is managed from the Meraki Cloud it is easy to integrate with your enterprise and any other platform you have in.
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
