Meraki MR are certainly one of the good products on the market. The ease of use, configuration from the dashboard and the rollout are certainly the main differentiators of Meraki. The lifetime warranty of MR (not outdoor models) is also a great advantage. But, the licenses to …
The Meraki stacks well versus all the other solutions I have tested and installed. When I have installed other solutions, it is at the request of the customer. Everyone has their favorite, and has their whys they prefer one vendor over the other.
Cisco Meraki also have a great Wifi solution and easily managed as well (even more user friendly). But, at the end, FortiAP just offer quite the same experience for less bucks. In greater deals, Meraki can sometimes be more agressive and compete on pricing structure, in this …
as a stand-alone product, the Fortinet wireless LAN solution isn't the most powerful, nor compelling out there. Others, like Cisco Meraki, offer great products, with added wifi features at a similar price point, but where Forti shines, is when integrated into a network with …
As far as features, Fortinet has them all. When compared to Meraki and WatchGuard, it comes out miles ahead. The biggest difference is price. You pay less for the Fortinet, but you do not lose the features you need to have a great solution.
The Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points is a good solution although not for everyone. Cost wise it is more expensive than competition. Technically speaking, if you are going for a full Cisco Meraki solution from firewall, switches, WAP, and management app, it requires a solid technical understanding of where each part and piece falls. If you have the money and the technical capabilities (in house or outsourced) then it is a solid platform that leans on Cisco's respectable history in the communications and infrastructure industry.
Fortinet offers great Security features and is one of the leaders on that, and integrating Wireless LAN infrastructure with Access points proved to work rather seamlessly. Ease of management, single platform and ability to customize licensing as per needs were elements in favor of adding the Wireless LAN solution from Fortinet to our security portfolio.
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.
So the Cisco Meraki MR Wireless Access Points dashboard, it's a little bit like comparing Apple and Android. So with Android you can do a lot more configuration, whereas with Meraki there are a lot of assumptions about a radio resource management. There are a lot of assumptions around, for instance, when it does a heat map, it's a heat map, which is a population density rather than a wireless coverage heat map. So that can cause confusion because normally when you look at heat map, you're looking at, that is a metric for how well it's performing rather than how many devices are using it. So I think that's always at the bone of contention around one of the things it can do.
In the web portal, it would be nice if you could create a customer, assign that customer all the devices in the solution, and have a single pane glass to manage them all. Right now you need to access different web links to manage the devices.
The security feature set could be a bit more sophistication, like an Arista AP which polices the air.
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.
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.
Fortinet offers excellent support. They will work with you until the solution is doing what it is designed to do, within its capabilities. They also do an excellent to follow-up with the end-user prior to closing the ticket.
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.
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.
as a stand-alone product, the Fortinet wireless LAN solution isn't the most powerful, nor compelling out there. Others, like Cisco Meraki, offer great products, with added wifi features at a similar price point, but where Forti shines, is when integrated into a network with firewall enablement such as FortiGate. Overall, it stacks up well with others and is a solution that needs to be evaluated in a purchasing project.
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.
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.
