Cisco Aironet 1500 Series Access Points (discontinued)
Score 6.2 out of 10
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Currently supported by Cisco, but no longer sold, Cisco recommends migration to the Cisco Catalyst 9100 Family of Access Points, which offer greater performance and flexibility.
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Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points
Score 9.1 out of 10
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Cisco's Meraki MR Series is a wireless LAN solution.
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Pricing
Cisco Aironet 1500 Series Access Points (discontinued)
Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco Aironet 1500 Series Access Points (discontinued)
Cisco Aironet 1500 Series Access Points (discontinued)
Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points
Likelihood to Recommend
Discontinued Products
Cisco Aironet 1550 Series Access Points is very useful for outdoor locations that are more exposed to the wilderness or the weather, which provides uninterrupted wifi access during high winds and bad weather. It also is useful for hazardous locations that are prone to danger or wildlife. Unfortunately, it would not be appropriate to get a Cisco Aironet 1550 Series Access Point if it is only needed for basic wifi use, or indoor use, as the extra features and price would not be necessary.
It's ideal if the company frequently uses mobile devices that need to work on Wi-Fi. It's also ideal if a company has multiple locations. Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points can then be easily deployed and managed via a central Meraki Dashboard. It also offers a powerful content filtering feature within the Cisco Meraki environment. This can be particularly useful for guest networks and in locations where certain content cannot be downloaded, such as a school.It's less suitable if a company has a limited IT budget and the network needs to be continuously expanded. In those cases, the associated license costs can quickly add up. In factories or other robustly built environments, RF tuning isn't feasible. As a result, the signal quality can sometimes be somewhat reduced.
Outdoor mesh bridging of access points brings significant cost savings to many of our production facilities. Deploying mesh APs is a significant cost reduction over trenching conduit to connect remote areas via fiber.
Cisco APs are extremely resilient, with a failure rate of below 5% in some of our harshest environments.
Cisco APs have the intelligence to identify wireless interference sources with Clean Air technology
It's cloud based, so as long as we have an internet connection, we can access it. Whenever we push a change, it's one stop like a single pane of glass to manage all our equipment. And so that's what I liked about it.
It is a solution that works very well. It is almost like setup and forget, since the solution works. When issues occur, documentation is available with detailed steps on how to solve this problems you are facing, of course Technical Support is always ready to help. We have had instances where an Access Point fails and within 2 days we have the replacement
To get basic functionality doesn't take long. Set up a new Meraki Dashboard activate the licenses and get internet connection for the APs and you are more or less done. The Dashboard will find your items and you're good to go.
The Cisco Aironet 1560 Series Access Points served their function well. They were reliable, provided decent speeds, resisted the elements, and provided a good investment. The only downsides were mostly appearance which doesn't matter that much. However, I believe that the tech in the access point is not future proof which is why I did not give it a nine or ten star rating.
Initially I had a problem with the regulatory and channel selection, it was a bug on the AP as it was fairly new, solved by TAC on engineering release, and since then it has been performing flawlessly.
We have not had any issues with the Meraki WiFi Access Point hardware but we did encounter a problem with a Meraki LAN switch that failed to power up. Upon a email into the Meraki Support, they promptly called back and we went over some quick tests to determine a power supply problem. A replacement LAN switch was sent to me the next day.
There were documents that detailed how the WiFi Access Point was to be installed and mounted. The only issue was to cable the device, we use a third party for this type of work and typically has to be performed after normal business hours. Other than that, the installation was easy.
Making the decision to use Aironet is more related to the type of scenario that you have. We chose Aironet because we mainly manage all the network internally and already have Cisco products to integrate with Meraki which is a good option if you are starting from scratch.
We were more on a Cisco Wireless Controller set up, which takes a lot longer to control and that's why we've actually gone through a cloud-based product, which is very easy compared with the old traditional way that we used to have. It's more ease of software. They've got very similar features, but it's easy to set up and maintain into the future.
The software of the Cisco Aironet 1560 is highly scalable, the software is very powerful so that the APs can be customized to the maximum and achieve the best performance of the network at the wifi level. The use of it is very easy for people with low knowledge.
As far as I know, it's 10. I mean, because like I said, I manage stuff in the south. I have coworkers that manage it in the north. And so the scalability of it to be able to be go in and see the configurations of the ones in the north as well as they can see in the south. So across the board, it works really well for how widespread out it is.
With only a few DOA's or failing devices, the AP's are of very high quality.
We expect them to run stable for many years, which is why our initial investment will be an intelligent choice compared to installing a cheaper product.
Although the AP's from Cisco is cutting-edge technology, the 802.11ac standard will be considered legacy in a few years, meaning that its a balance to purchase a well-designed product that won't outlast the tech that it provides. Imagine having an investment in a large fleet of high-quality 802.11b AP's 20 years ago. Although they would still be working flawlessly due to their good quality, the bandwidth would probably be unacceptable to most modern consumers.
Uptime has improved significantly. The dashboard automatically keeps devices up to date by scheduling upgrades at remote times (say 2am on a Sunday)
Swapping to Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points has reduced the management overhead. No more long controller software hardware upgrades and obviously no more need for beefy central controllers.
