The Cisco Embedded Wireless Controller on Catalyst Access Points (EWC-AP) is a next-generation Wi-Fi solution, combining an advanced controller – the Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers – with a Wi-Fi 6 access point – the Cisco Catalyst 9100 Access Points – to create a wireless experience for evolving and growing organization.
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Extreme Wireless Access Points
Score 9.3 out of 10
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Extreme Networks' Wireless Access Points (or ExtremeWireless) are designed to provide performance in the most demanding environments with the latest Wi-Fi technologies including 6 GHz, OFDMA, MU-MIMO, and software-defined dual 6 GHz radios.
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.
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.
Ease of use and Management. The process of implementing APs is straight forward and managing the wireless infrastructure is quite simple and efficient.
Coverage: we are very happy with the distance each AP coverages in our warehouses without having any drop issues or over implementing APs.
Cost competitive versus other cloud managed wi-fi solutions such as Cisco, Aruba or Mist.
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.
Giving this rating as i have recommended and configured EWC for many customer where they don't needed much AP and on-prem controller was also not needed. most of features available on 9800 WLC is also available on EWC
Extreme Wireless Access Points are easy to manage. They are easy to deploy and install. The hardware and firmware are reliable. There a number of things to be improved since we are still using the WiNG platform, but all of those things will be much better when we migrate to CloudIQ.
Extreme Wireless Access Points can support all our devices, even in high capacity areas. They are easy to manage and get basic information. There was a time back around 2017-2018 where people's devices needed to make sure they were using the latest wireless drivers; otherwise, people were having connection issues. Other than that time period, we were able to have fewer complaints from end users.
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.
Cisco EWC is better to all its competitor as it provide same robust solution which is available to its hardware based controller, Customer experiences are similar to what other 9800 hardware based devices provides.
I've used both Aruba and Cisco (traditional, not Meraki) for wireless, and each have their own strengths. Aruba offers a lot of feature functionality, though the interface is difficult and confusing to use (this was ~4 years ago). Cisco wireless is fairly straightforward to set up and expand, though features are more limited. Aerohive's benefit is the easy+speed of deployment. I've also used the Citrix NetScaler SSL VPN soft client and that works fairly well, though it doesn't compare like-for-like due to the fact that it's software vs. Aerohive, which is hardware.
Linking APs to AD, via NPS, and gaining the password reset policy; helped us move past some issues that we were held up on with SOC
Segregating corporate wifi and guest wifi, plus forcing guest wifi to agree to the Acceptable Use Policy, was needed to pass a compliance audit of the network.
Being able to locate which users are connected to which individual wifi AP, has been a asset with troubleshooting
APs sharing connections allows for us to overlap the wifi zones and create redundancy if an AP were to go offline for any reason.
