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 Juniper Access Points
Score 8.2 out of 10
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The Juniper AP Series Access Points work in conjunction with the Juniper Mist Cloud Architecture and Mist AI to collect and analyze metadata in near real-time from all wireless clients. This is to enable rapid problem detection and root cause identification with predictive recommendations and proactive correction realizing the self-driving network.
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.
The Mist portal-controlled Juniper APs are great in an environment where clients are relatively stationary. Coverage is fantastic, and throughput is really good. I would be more concerned about placing these in a distribution-type warehouse where clients frequently roam between APs. While I've not had any issues, I could see where some APs might become sticky due to the cloud-controlled nature. In my experience, a local controller would be better suited to environments like that. I'm also concerned that support and quality may suffer due to the HPE merger.
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.
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.
We used a reseller to help set up and initially manage the Juniper APs. Templates are set up and deployed to sites, and at first, it may seem complicated, with a slight learning curve. Once created and deployed, the overall management and usability are great. In summary, the initial setup takes some advanced knowledge of the Cloud Dashboard setup with templates. After that, it's easy to use and manage moving forward.
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.
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.
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.
