Cisco Aironet 3800 Series Access Points (discontinued)
Score 10.0 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 9.2 out of 10
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Cisco's Meraki MR Series is a wireless LAN solution.
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Pricing
Cisco Aironet 3800 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 3800 Series Access Points (discontinued)
The Cisco Meraki MR line of products stacks well against legacy Cisco Aironet equipment and comes with the added benefit of being cloud managed. I also like the fact that traditional legacy Wireless servers are no longer needed since all Meraki equipment runs through the …
Cisco Aironet 3800 Series Access Points (discontinued)
Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points
Likelihood to Recommend
Discontinued Products
As any Cisco Aironet Access Points, the 3800 model is more for power users than beginners. It is for sure very more complex to maintain and trouble shoot than solutions like Cisco Meraki APs.
By the way, there are a lot of settings that can be customized and it is really interesting for difficult environments like industrial factories.
The 3800 model is also robust so it should stay durable and reliable.
But if you want to use the mesh mode or make a wireless bridge, this model is not appropriate as it is not supported for now.
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.
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 3802 product performance is excellent. Not only for the speed and range of the wireless it provides, but also for the fact that - when deployed in a large scale environment - the performance does not fail. It provides the same network connectivity for users ranging from 1 to 30-plus concurrent connections.
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.
The usage scenario was different. I don't see this as a benefit versus harm comparison, necessarily. What happened was that, at a certain point, the implementation of the cisco solution was the winner of our public bidding process and with that, we implemented it and have used it ever since.
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.
Contrary to a solution like the Cisco Meraki access points, the Aironet access points like the 3800 are linked to the Controler. And depending on the version of the controller, it will support only some models of access points.
For big sites, it may be difficult to upgrade the controler to support new ap models like 3800 because we still have old access points.
And it is also the same between new access points and old client devices so it is always a bit tricky.
After that, if the access point model is supported by the controller, it is really simple to install a new one
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.
Users are able to carry on with their work while moving, changing seats, rooms or having an ad-hoc Skype meeting on the way to lunch. It is always hard to justify the value of connectivity but be assured, when it is not working the business impact is immediate.
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.
