Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers vs. Cisco Embedded Wireless Controller

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

Overall I could see myself recommending these to others if they have the right set of circumstances at their place of business. Those would be like ours, if they had a location that couldnt be served by a WLC. Once setup they are easy to manage and self healing as in they wont go down when one is offline.

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

• Offers enterprise-class security that keeps the network protected
• Cost-effective connectivity
• Deploying WiFi 6 network without complexity or added expense
• Controlling access points and clients

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

• Some bugs in the interface.
• Issues with licensing and Cisco DNA integration.
• Frequent software patches needed,

Incentivized

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

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

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

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

You need to understand wifi basics

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

Cisco Embedded Wireless Controller provides the ability to manage and deploy the wireless network from a web UI or mobile application, and without the expense or complexity of a wireless controller appliance.

Incentivized

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

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

• Makes having remote sites less problematic when it comes to managing AP's
• Saved money on managed AP's as they're found cheaper
• Takes more time to manage additional controllers versus a WLC

Incentivized