Cisco Meraki Wireless Access Point vs WatchGuard Secure Wi-Fi Cloud

• Cisco Meraki Wireless Access Point, when set up properly in a large environment does a great job creating a seamless Wi-Fi enterprise class environment. The AP's mesh very well and with proper a design layout they can create a very robust and reliable Wi-Fi network capable of handling all your network needs.
• Cisco Meraki Wireless Access Points come with the cloud enabled Meraki Dashboard. The dashboard enables your IT Department to manage all Cisco Meraki Wireless Access Points from one pane of glass (one interface) as well as any other Cisco Meraki device; switches, firewalls, cameras, etc...
• The Cisco Meraki Dashboard provides an interface that makes troubleshooting and problem resolution more intuitive by providing seamless integration with all Cisco Meraki devices. If a Cisco Meraki Wireless Access Point goes offline, you can set up email alerts to stay proactive in providing rapid response solutions. Swapping out a device in most cases takes only minutes due to the cloud based configuration transfer to the new device.
• Visibility and control over your Wi-Fi bandwidth is intuitive and easy to manage. the Firewall and traffic shaping feature allows you use layer 7 firewall rules to block unwanted applications such as peer-to-peer (P2P), Advertising, Web File Sharing, Gaming, Blogging, Online Backups, etc...many categories to choose from. You can eve block HTTP hostnames, ports, and remote IP addresses ranges and port ranges. Other traffic shaping rules include per client bandwidth limits and per SSID bandwidth limits. If you want to separate your corporate LAN from your guest networks, it as simple as setting up the included layer 3 firewall rules.

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• Ease of configuration of your Wi-Fi solution.
• Full security feature set including IPS, and policing.
• Event monitoring is second to none. Easy to troubleshoot any issue.

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• WiFi6 is only available on the most expensive models
• Model MR18 (End of Sale now, but we have some that are still operating) tend to suspend 2, 4GHz band transmission, and the APs have to be reset.
• Full integration with Cisco DNA

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• As far as a native VLAN configuration, VLAN 0 is used while mostly all other vendors use VLAN 1 as the default (native) VLAN. Minor detail, but keeps configuration standard across the board.
• The policing feature is powerful, but at times too powerful and needs to be modified a few times before getting the solution where you need it to be. Different levels of policing would be nice, with the option of creating your own and/or modifying an existing template.

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• We are in education, and our mandate is to provide wireless networking to all students and staff, and Meraki has done that for us.
• Since we are a school, we don't measure ROI the same way businesses do, but we do have to justify our expenditures, and we have determined that Meraki provides us with very good value for the cost.
• We have also had a very low failure rate, so we are happy with that too.

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• The ROI for every customer we have deployed this solution has been within months. This is especially seen with customers who resell their Wi-Fi service.
• Due to the stability of the solution, our NOC spends less time troubleshooting issues and outages which in turns gives them time to focus on other customer issues.
• Due to the success of these deployments, our company continues to resell this product and has received higher discounts during the sale process which in turn have increased our profit margins.

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