Cisco Aironet 2800 Series Access Points (discontinued) vs. Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers

Cisco Aironet 2800 Series Access Points is very well suited for large enterprises and high-density environments. It is not well suited for high ceiling buildings like warehouses and storage places because of low antenna gain. In our main office, it is working very well. For around thirty or so wireless devices this access point works very well and after forty or so wireless devices it starts to suffer.

Incentivized

for well suited, with all these big organizations you can have regional or distributed controller base. I think this is better and then you can consolidate things. All this whole infrastructure to the single locations. Not be a good fit? If you have a small organizations then yeah, maybe some other traditional physical controller.

Incentivized

• They are rock solid in terms of reliability (we rarely have to replace them).
• They are easily managed from the controller. It's easy to push new settings out, like RF profiles, etc...
• They are fairly easy to install using the included mounting brackets.
• They seem to be compatible with pretty much everything, although occasionally we will have roaming issues with Apple devices.

Incentivized

• I guess it's very good at managing large scale deployments because I can change configuration on basically all of our devices at once if I want to. It gives us a quick and easy overview of all of the clients, all of the healthy status of our devices.
• It's very good at troubleshooting because it pulls logs from a hardware level, whereas otherwise we'd have to log into each device ourselves and get those logs. It does that automatically.

Incentivized

• CleanAir - Put this technology into all the APs.
• GPS Tracker - I can't understand why only the Cisco 1570 has this option as well as larger Cisco 3800 APs. Why can't this be in all APs so they can be easily mapped in Google for positioning and later plotted for the coverage zone.

Incentivized

• If possible, please add a column for WAP Name and WAP Model within the 2.4/5/6 GHz radio sections, as we have different models of WAPs in the fleet, and it would be easier to identify WAPs within a building.
• We conduct digital exams for our students. If there is a way to identify clients and block traffic for applications like ChatGPT, it would be greatly appreciated. Currently, there is no filter for ChatGPT or generative AI.

Incentivized

Because until now I haven't had any issues or cases where I needed to create a ticket with Tac from Cisco related to their performance or availability. They have a small size that permits or allows you to install it in each place that you need to mount it, their design is small and appropriate for every kind of office.

Despite common software and hardware issues this is still the best product on the market for large scale enterprise deployments. Cisco has worked with us extensively to reduce the amount of bugs in every iteration however new bugs are introduced or new incompatibilities always arise with major releases. Thus, while I'm hesitant to recommend the product it's still much better than all the other competitors such as Aruba and Juniper in the WIFi space. There is also extensive integration with DNAC/Catalyst Center and ISE in an SDA deployment. Recently there has been a number of critical issues with the controller software and Cisco has proved themselves to be incapable of timely troubleshooting and diagnosis. This has reduced our confidence in the product and it's current and future stability and maintainability. At it's current state the product is taking up too much of our engineering resources to maintain despite also paying for premium support from Cisco. As such I have reduced by rating as we are likely to look at alternative vendors for our long-term wireless management solution

Incentivized

Lately we had less issues. Most probably because we reduced the number of Wireless LAN controllers. So less trouble for upgrades as well. We don't have any access point in stand alone mode. It's something I don't suggest, unless it's just for a small office and not for a larger company with different sites.

Incentivized

It's not simple, but this is the result of being very deeply configurable

Incentivized

This access point does not usually randomly shut off. It can't happen but it's generally due to a power over ethernet failures which would could be considered a user error.

Incentivized

High availability options are very good. You have multiple options so you can select whichever suits you well. Also you can mix it up if you have more controllers so your downtime risk decreases sharply. Users will not feel any connection issues thanks to powerful and flexible high availability options that Cisco provides.

Incentivized

Performance wise [Cisco Aironet 2800 Series Access Points] are among of the best pieces of technology we have on premise. I don't say that lightly, we have a lot of cool tech. But if you consider how many users are connecting to these day in and day out without a single blip when they're downloading large files, roaming to new AP's or needing a boosted signal at a far end of the range then these are unmatched.

Incentivized

While it works well in general, there are some bugs in both the GUI and functionality. It has caused spikes of downtime in our network. The HA also is quite cumbersome and specific to set up, while not having the most reliable working around.

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I believe that there is always room for improvement.

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When it's a config issue, TAC is usually useful. If it's some bug and BU needs to be involved, it might take forever.

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Make sure to get a professional wireless assessment before purchasing AP's. That way you will only purchase what you need and know where the wiring infrastructure will need to be to streamline the installation and tuning process.

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You need to understand wifi basics

Incentivized

D-Link Wireless network solution was being used previously in [a] few areas of our plant and it was working well with [a] low number of users but as the company grew, and user base started to grow we started seeing hanging, disconnection, and very low-performance issues in our wireless network. We replaced the entire network with Cisco Aironet Access Points and since then the issues have been resolved and [the] wireless network is working with great performance.

Incentivized

Not much yet. In my experience from becoming a network engineer four-ish years ago to now, like I said, I used that 5520, which was a Cisco product. These 9800 are a lot smaller and tinier and they seem to do a lot more that the other ones couldn't do. It's a good product.

Incentivized

When it comes to deploying the Cisco Aironet 2800 Series Access Points in locations around the school district it has become easier as you get used to putting 4 screws in the mounting plate to the bracket and then slide the access point onto the bracket.

Incentivized

There are different vesrions for different requirements, there's HA as well.

Incentivized

• There are cost savings in buying a separate WLAN network controller because the 1850 Access Point already has this integrated feature.
• It allows for remote management and saves time on administration.
• The return on investment is achieved in a short period of time.

Incentivized

• I think that it has had a positive impact, especially with the dashboard being a university. The 9800 dashboard gives us one spot where we can go to see how many clients are on each of our SSIDs or perhaps client utilization. We've dashboard may be saying, Hey, you have one building that has 90 people connected to one access point. So that gives us the information we need to go in and expand that coverage or add in some high density to address those issues.

Incentivized