The Cisco Catalyst 9800-80 is a modular wireless controller with optional 100 Gigabit Ethernet (G) modular uplinks boasting seamless software updates for large enterprises and campuses, and security with ETA and SD-Access.
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Ubiquiti WLAN
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Ubiquiti offers a family of WLAN products, namely the UniFi line of products.
Chose Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers
Ubiquiti WLAN is very much a consumer platform. It is not production ready, it is buggy, it has issues. It is cheaper than Cisco, but you get what you pay for. Aruba doesn't integrate nicely with our existing largely Cisco based networks, so when time came to replace AireOS, …
I really like central switching. Central switching is converging all of the tunnels, fewer people can administer the product. It's much easier to scale, it's much easier to configure and it's much easier to get predictable results out of that. I have run FlexConnect before under AireOS. I'm proficient with it. But yeah, I think as a centralized controller it works very well. And I think as building redundancy with regard to not just HA-SSO but with an N plus one design, I think the scheme and logic and architecture of the platform is very well thought out and I don't know what use cases I would find it to be lacking. There's a few things when you drill into it, it actually is not that simple. AireOS I feel like was a lot simpler. I think the catalyst, how it breaks out the hierarchy of configuration requires each of these tags and profiles and policies and how you bring them together. Actually, even though they've decoupled a lot of these elements from how AireOS did it, I think fewer of those features, even though it was less extensible, it was not as easy or intuitive to deploy. So I think the intuition and how you actually construct a 9800, an entry engineer would struggle a lot more in a 9800. So I would not recommend the product if somebody did not already have a good foundation of network engineering.
Ubiquiti is well suited to not just indoor WLAN access, but also outdoors. In fact, the range of the outdoor applications, while maintaining throughput is astonishing. I would say this is not a solution for a 1-5 person small office, due to the costs.
Particularly well I would say especially compared to the previous generation of controllers, it gives a lot of additional troubleshooting logging tools for us to determine problems that didn't exist in prior devices. Where we used to have to send someone out, boots on the ground and physically show up at a location, there's a lot of tools now that we can use to remotely diagnose those problems.
You should have one single license that can cover all. Otherwise you need to have a very, very advanced license that only can see full visibility for this. And most of the times you need to integrate it with others. We do have the catalyst center to manage this controllers and it requires a certain license to run in so that we can see troubleshooting is easy for the end users. We can see all the end to ends. It should have maybe one single license that you can apply for everything. So instead of to have separate product at different license, but we we're integrating together.
Management of devices has become much simpler with the UNMS application, but personally, I would like to see some AirMax-like devices from their Unifi line where everything could be managed from an Unifi controller.
Most Ubiquiti devices are 24V PoE, which is the bane of my existence. I have had several devices fried when staff plugged into standard 48V PoE. They generally don't fail catastrophically, either. You just get strange issues that are difficult to diagnose and eventually need to replace them.
Devices seem to have trouble with many patch cables/switches. Make sure you certify any patch cables you make and don't over crimp.
Sending devices from the factory with same 192.168.1.20 IP instead of DHCP makes it a pain to bulk-setup devices.
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
Ubiquiti makes great Access points at various tiers provided far better coverage and throughput than consumer-grade wireless repeaters and routers. We have not had any performance complaints from guests or from the administration who use the wifi on a daily basis.
Due to our HA set up we have always managed to access our wireless networks without problems, when issues occur. When we have lost access to the GUI, due to internal network problems, console access is always welcomed and brings with it the normal Cisco CLI syntax. From previous versions of CLI, it is now a lot simpler and reflects other Cisco products, making it easier to troubleshoot and navigate when necessary.
Monitoring is very good Seamless integration with Cisco ISE RRM configuration very easy. It has REST API support IOS-XE is very powerful operation system. Multicasting and mDNS features are really good and very easy to configure. It supports Pyats and Genie so getting constructed data from python script calls very helpful.
Ubiquiti's support is basically non-existent by design. However, their forums are a great resource if you are willing to do the research and ask questions. Keep in mind Ubiquiti sells hardware, not support so the responses will be from the community of professionals also using Ubiquiti just like you.
Ubiquiti WLAN is very much a consumer platform. It is not production ready, it is buggy, it has issues. It is cheaper than Cisco, but you get what you pay for. Aruba doesn't integrate nicely with our existing largely Cisco based networks, so when time came to replace AireOS, the Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers came out on top.
We have used products from Netgear, ZyXEL, Cloudmesh, Datto, Mereki, and EnGenius previously often choosing products based on a specific situation, since starting with Ubiquiti [WLAN] we have pretty much stopped [usage] of all other vendors in the networking field and standardized which better allows us to stock spare equipment. Best part is if you need to replace equipment it is easy to swap it out quickly as the controller also acts as a live configuration backup.
The newer controllers are more robust and capable of supporting newer WAPs, such as WiFi 6 or WiFi 6E. With the announcement of WiFi 7 WAPs at Cisco Live 2024 in Melbourne, we will be better equipped to provide services for high-throughput applications and support clients in high-density environments.
The overall GUI has improved from 8540 and it is easier to manage.
One point I would like to mention is that integrating Prime with the Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers would be great, as it would allow us to receive real-time user data.
