Aruba Instant Wi-Fi Access Points vs. Cisco Aironet 4800 Access Points (discontinued)

It is possible that we have a bad luck with the deployment. However, It is capable to perform enterprise-level security to fit some of the organization's standards. With Airwave and other tools, it's easy to manage and administrate your wireless environment. Make aware of the IPsec tunnel from each user to the controller if you are using Clearpass for NAC. If you have a remote office with local resources, you will need controller or IAP to route traffic locally. If you have many remote offices, you will need to deploy controllers or IAP in each office, which lead to additional cost and management.

Cisco Aironet 4800 Access Points are well suited for a larger office or organization that has multiple buildings that require a larger-scale wireless network. The controller makes it easy to discover and deploy radios in a timely manner. The Cisco Aironet 4800 Access Points are probably not well suited for smaller offices where one radio will suffice.

Incentivized

• They offer both a controller-based and controller-less option. This allows customers of all sizes to deploy a wireless network without the upfront cost of controller hardware. A controller can be added later.
• Aruba also offers Airwave which is a single management point for all AP swarms in the environment. It offers many reporting features as well as visual RF maps displaying heatmaps of the AP signals and client positioning.
• The Aruba Access Point we have (224s and 225s) also offer both PoE and external power supplies for those smaller deployments that may not have PoE capable switches.

Incentivized

• Ease of setup
• Area of coverage
• Device life

Incentivized

• We have had a bunch of these stop working after a power outages. We are guessing a surge or something caused them to stop working.
• Some of the documentation is outdated. It seems they like to make changes to how things work and it usually mean less access and insight into the devices you manage.
• The auto signal strength feature could use a little work. It seems like even when we turn it down all the way it tries ot increases the signal strength.

Incentivized

Aruba Networks Wireless LAN is very intuitive to use. After the initial learning curve for the Aruba OS platform, it is straightforward. Day-to-day tasks, such as deploying an access point with a configuration, are very straightforward. Standard incremental system upgrades are also very intuitive. If you have any past experience with Aruba network switching or Cisco switching, the command structure is relatively similar.

Incentivized

I give this rating because right out of the box we were able to configure multiple radios in the console and deploy them to our environment in a very short amount of time. The only issues we had was there was a bad radio, which was replaced quickly and easily.

Incentivized

It is a reliable and complete solution for providing wireless network to users. I had no technical problems during those years. The Aruba controller and access points have always worked very well and we have greatly improved the relationship with customers and we now have absolute control over the wireless network traffic. It has quality assurance and support with efficient service as well.

Incentivized

Cisco Aironet did not even compare to Aruba, Aruba was so far advanced from Cisco back when we used them. Aruba solved several business problems all in one ecosystem, all Cisco did was acted as somewhat intelligent Access Points. Aruba enabled us to leverage VoIP, use APs as VPN endpoints/devices, manage individual devices as assets, etc.

Incentivized

We are not using any other Cisco products at this time.

Incentivized

I gave the rating I did because, in my opinion, this product scales very well. We are able to add as many radios as we need to to expand our network to more sites, as we need them. So far, I have not had any issues when installing new radios.

Incentivized

• Excellent uptime and reliability
• If licensed properly, failover is easy
• The newest version upgrade is somewhat cumbersome as they want us to replace hardware, which seems silly, so we are on the most current legacy supported version. Once unsupported, we will need to replace hardware.

Incentivized