The Cisco 5520 Series Wireless LAN Controller is a highly scalable, service-rich, resilient, and flexible platform that is ideal for medium-sized to large enterprise and campus deployments.
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HPE Networking Instant On Access Points
Score 8.4 out of 10
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HPE Networking Instant On Access Points, formerly under the Aruba Networks brand, are presented as fast WLAN solutions for small to midsize businesses, supporting indoor and outdoor connectivity, in any environment and for any number of devices.
Cisco is the most stable company in switching parts including wireless, and it has the most powerful support team with a lot of online documents, community, and market share so when you get stuck, you can find support from anywhere. And usually, you won't need it as its product …
At this point the Cisco 5520 Wireless Controllers are end of life as a Cisco product, so I would not recommend them to anyone looking to purchase a wireless controller for an enterprise. However, many people are still using these, and they do work reliably, even if they are a bit long in the tooth now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This equipment from Cisco has been dependable and we are able to easily continue to add access points or make changes easily to the Wi-Fi password settings.
We have been operating this equipment for a number of years and it does not give us any issues.
Overall the usability is ok. The centralized management reduces complexibility and offers bulk features like adding access points to specific groups which automatically applies linked configurations.
On the other hand the GUI is very outdated and some features are not displayed correctly on new browsers. Also automation possibilities are very limited compared to the new 9800 series controller.
It is a good and stable product, and does exactly what it is intended for. It provides a good wifi connection, and ensures that the users on the work floor can do their work well. In addition, there are so many technical possibilities, that you can configure the wifi network completely to the specific wishes of the work floor.
Cisco support is always ready to support and engage in any problem or issue. Starting from the implementation support, troubleshooting any software issue or hardware. Their engineers are engaging whenever we ask for support, keep following up with us, and troubleshoot any problem till we find a solution and be satisfied [with] the service.
Aruba Wireless Network support has always been reliable and great to work with. There was a period during the HPE acquisition of Aruba Wireless where getting in touch with an engineer took somewhat longer than usual, but it still was not a huge issue. The most difficult part of the merger was getting an accurate view of our inventory according to HPE Aruba as they were merging/choosing a system to host all of that information.
Just take your time when setting up the HA pairs as those can be tricky. Also take your time setting up AP groups and make sure they are on all the SSIDs you need to be on.
Cisco Identity Services Engine is well integrated on Cisco 5520 Wireless Controller because the WLC supports a lot of authentication methods and security protocols (such as PEAP, EAP-TLS, Captive Portal redirect). They perform very well with ISE. Cisco ISE is able to manage centrally the AAA sessions from all the WLCs keeping a central point of management for wireless infrastructure.
When comparing Aruba Instant Wi-Fi Access Points to Cisco Meraki MR the most significant factors are pricing and license fees. At the current cost of one Meraki MR AP, we can deploy three Aruba Instant Wi-Fi Access Points, providing equivalent functionality, coverage, and performance.
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.
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.
