Cisco 5520 Wireless Controller vs FortiAP

• It has the ability to manage all Cisco access points that we have, regardless of the model. The limit is 1500 pieces of equipment.
• The WLC enables roaming functionality in the localities, this helps with collections, wireless IP phones, and access with notebooks.
• The WLC manages the quality of the "air" and "signal" of the 2.4ghz frequency, avoiding noise and interference.
• The WLC has an interesting feature of visibility of the traffic of the internal network.

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• Built sturdy for harsh environments.
• They perform and/or surpass performance levels shown on their data sheets.

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• We have had some issues with access points losing their configurations and going offline. This is not a common issue and we are not entirely certain if it is a fault of the controller or the individual APs. That said, the controller does not appear to retain the knowledge of the offline AP which can be a management headache.

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• Deploying your first AP is a little confusing - you need to register it with Fortinet, and then deploy it. I am a master now, but this took me call to support to understand how to roll these out.
• Adding them in to the correct folders on Forticloud took a little bit of figuring out, but again, once I had it it was simple.

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• [It provides] centralized management.
• Implementing the [Cisco] 5520 [Wireless] Controllers offered us a huge improvement in administrative time over our previous Cisco 3850 deployment. Being able to see all of our APs on a single controller as well as centrally manage them is a great benefit. This also removed the need to deploy specific equipment in different IDFs throughout our Industrial locations and instead only requiring switches with Power Over Ethernet (POE) capability.
• Wireless performance has improved with the deployment of our 5520s, which allows our plant operators to do their jobs more efficiently while on the move.
• Having three Cisco 5520 Wireless Controllers provides tertiary redundancy for our wireless networks. The solution is elegantly simple. Preventing downtime is, obviously, a profound part of our supply chain capabilities.

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• Increased overall coverage of wireless for my users - no more calls about dropped wireless (our cell service is very spotty).
• Easy to roll out - no issues here.
• Expensive - you are paying for a business, not a home use devices - sticker shock might happen initially.

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