Cisco Aironet 4800 Access Points (discontinued) vs. Extreme Wireless Access Points

Cisco Aironet 4800 Access Points are well suited for a larger office or organization that has multiple buildings that require a larger-scale wireless network. The controller makes it easy to discover and deploy radios in a timely manner. The Cisco Aironet 4800 Access Points are probably not well suited for smaller offices where one radio will suffice.

Incentivized

The Extreme access point solution has been used in the cooperative scenario with VLANs for employees in access through 802.1x authentication and also for guests through the captive portal that allows access of people for a limited time and prior registration. The equipment has great performance and connection speed and supports a high density of users connected at the same time without lag and crashes. The management of this equipment is being carried out through software with cloud management and is accessed by our infrastructure team to configure and monitor alerts.

Incentivized

• Ease of setup
• Area of coverage
• Device life

Incentivized

• Extremely easy to provision new devices, once the profiles are set up, due to centralized management
• Very quick provisioning of new devices, due to centralized management and predefined profiles

Incentivized

• In my experience, licensing has become a nightmare. Licensing must be tied to a device, they also won't let you activate used units from other companies if they are donated or purchased third-party.
• Customer service is outsourced overseas.
• In my experience, technicians are incentivized to close tickets quickly - whether the issue has been fixed or not - which can be frustrating to work with.

Incentivized

It has worked for us as advertised with little technical issues. The system has been stable with no major downtime.

Incentivized

I give this rating because right out of the box we were able to configure multiple radios in the console and deploy them to our environment in a very short amount of time. The only issues we had was there was a bad radio, which was replaced quickly and easily.

Incentivized

Set up was easy, speed is excellent, we have had the office full and no noticeable reduction in service/speed.

Incentivized

Support was always responsive and willing to help, but at times did not know when to call it and send a replacement to stop the bleeding. I respect that fact that they wanted to get the solution working, and the wanting to learn more and understand, but at times you cant do that at the expense of the customer.

Incentivized

We are not using any other Cisco products at this time.

Incentivized

The Aerohive wireless devices are comparable to Cisco's wireless solution, in regard to performance, features, and management. But the cost of utilizing Cisco Wireless Access Points versus using the Aerohive access points is staggering. Since our wireless access points do not maintain a constant heavy load, we chose a more cost effective solution and have not had many issues with them.

Incentivized

I gave the rating I did because, in my opinion, this product scales very well. We are able to add as many radios as we need to to expand our network to more sites, as we need them. So far, I have not had any issues when installing new radios.

Incentivized

• Less downtime to our business units that use Aerohive
• Radios are very compatible with most wireless devices out today
• I spend less time managing Aerohive than any other wireless product

Incentivized