Extreme Wireless Access Points vs. UniFi Cloud Gateways

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.

Incentivized

Ubiquiti's wireless WAN solution is suitable for usage in businesses of all sizes. Smaller businesses may not profit as much from the integration of Wi-Fi devices due to the high expense of doing so, hence the cost-benefit analysis favors larger businesses. In big and medium-sized businesses, having access to such tools improves network security and administration by allowing for several, conceptually separate networks to be managed and made available from a single Wi-Fi access point.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Automatically load balances based on band. Makes it simple to spread out users.
• Updates can be set to automatic or manual. Automatic uses rolling updates, happens every time we update the controller.
• Continually add new features and improvements with their FREE software upgrades

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Supply can be a problem, especially for new products. We have had to sometimes wait for months for supply to come in.
• No phone support. Only email/chat. can be frustrating sometimes just texting someone, but have not had to contact them very often.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The combination of performance, range, low-power use, and manageability made it ideal for us.

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We have not needed to contact support, except to replace one device that was damaged in shipping. The company immediately issued an RMA without delay, and we had our replacement product within a week

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.

Incentivized

In the past, we used D-Link wi-fi devices, where centralized management was not possible, distributing the same SSID through several devices. Which cost configuration time and instability in the use between one point and another, because eventually, this transition between a device and another by a client was not transparent and functional as it is today with the Ubiquiti solution.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Huge cost savings. Buy it once and you are done, no annual renewals.
• Extremely reliable and scalable. We went from 0 to 900 Chromebooks in 2 years.
• Very little maintenance, set it and forget it. Allows us to focus on other tasks.

Incentivized