Cisco 9800 Wireless LAN Controller Review
Updated March 11, 2025

Cisco 9800 Wireless LAN Controller Review

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers

We use the wireless and controller to deploy all of our WIFI across the university. The problem that addresses essentially is managing a fleet of over 10,000 access points. That provides WIFI access to all of our students across all campuses. In peak usage, we see anywhere between 50,000 to 60,000 devices online simultaneously on WIFI, and the land controller helps us manage all of that and address issues when they come on.

Pros

  • I guess it's very good at managing large scale deployments because I can change configuration on basically all of our devices at once if I want to. It gives us a quick and easy overview of all of the clients, all of the healthy status of our devices.
  • It's very good at troubleshooting because it pulls logs from a hardware level, whereas otherwise we'd have to log into each device ourselves and get those logs. It does that automatically.

Cons

  • I guess the biggest problem with the WLC is there are some scalability issues. So one example is in the 9800s, WLCs, as opposed to the earlier version, which is the AOS WLCs. Cisco has migrated from, for example, SNMP to NETCONF for telemetry. We've seen decreases in performance due to the scale of data that's been sent over NETCONF. That's quite a visible decrease compared to the older version. So the older version on SNMP was actually running faster and it was extracting data faster than the current version.
  • Another issue that we see is in terms of scalability is once the number of APs gets close to limits, so the 9800-80 has a limit of I think 6,000 access points per controller. Once we hit that limit, it becomes very slow to do things like generate show tech. We've had show and show tech wireless in particular take up to eight hours and Cisco has said that that is an expected timeframe for us to generate essentially a crash dump. That makes our troubleshooting very difficult because it takes us a long time to get the data to Cisco support. It also makes our monitoring difficult because sometimes we had to scale back the amount of data that's been extracted because it can't send enough data to our monitoring systems.
  • I guess I can't personally speak much to the actual ROI because I'm not the one making the purchasing decisions, but I think the return on investment has been good because we've actually, we started with two now we end up with five controllers running across our organization. So it's for the scale that we use it for.
That also feeds the telemetry that also ingests the telemetry fit by the controllers and allows us to have historical data and correlate events a lot easier. We've also been sending the data straight to Splunk, which is now I guess part of Cisco as well. So those two products help us with monitoring and having historical views of data.
Because we've had issues quite recently actually with high variability. We've run into various bugs and issues where we're not able to have proper data replication. We've raised tech cases for that and we've had issues with the crashing as well. One instance in particular, a month back we had an issue where high availability wasn't actually working, but there was no indication of it on the system. So when the controller failed over, it crashed and it failed over. We actually lost confi on our backup controller. And that's been an ongoing case with Cisco since a few months back.
We haven't had many issues so far. We have upgrade multiple times throughout the years, but so far so good. And I think it's getting better over time as the patch release has become more mature.
I'd say 9 out of 10 in terms of organizing policy because it does very good at doing bulk policy updates and the implementation of various site tags and policy tags are very useful for differentiating different access points in different areas. So for example, I can tag area with a special RF profile or a special set of SSIDs and that separates from other access points nearby. So that granularity is very good compared to its previous iteration

Do you think Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers again?

Yes

I guess a good scenario where it's well suited is when a user reports a WIFI issue at a particular time of day, we're able to actually go into that time window and extract all of the logs from our access points and from our controller to see exactly what is happening to their user when they, for example, attempt to connect network, but they're not able to begin decline. That's a particular use case where it's very good. A use case where it's not useful, that's actually hard to say. I guess it's not particularly good at correlating large groups of data, so that's something that we have other products to use. For example, if a large group of users report issues during a particular timeframe or a particular location, it doesn't correlate all of the user data. You can only draw down to individual users.

Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers Feature Ratings

Wireless LAN
Not Rated
Zero-Touch Provisioning
Not Rated
WLAN Performance Monitoring
Not Rated
Topology Maps
Not Rated
Layer 7 Visibility
Not Rated
Power over Ethernet Support
Not Rated
Wireless Security
Not Rated

Using Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers

10 - Network operations and installations, our users maintain the optimal functioning of the wireless network by monitoring wireless health statistics, alerts, and troubleshooting user problems using the built-in tools on the controller. They also represent the function of upgrading and reviewing our inventory of over 10000 Access Points using the controllers are a means to see what has been deployed and to configure new deployments.
5 - CCNA/CCNP qualified network engineers who have a detailed understanding of WiFi and familiarity with Linux command line. Require attention to detail and critical thinking in order to resolve complex software problems with the Controller or raise a TAC case. It also requires people with patience and adaptability as the there are variety of systems within the controller which could go wrong and the TAC troubleshooting process is lengthy and involves detailed testing and log gathering. The administrators must be able to tolerate a high workload and high-stress situations because when the controllers fail during critical usage periods we can disrupt over 30,000 users and the issues must be resolved as fast as possible with minimal impact.
  • Support seamless client roaming, between APs, buildings, controllers
  • Support troubleshooting via radioactive trace, build-in tracees, and built-in packet captures
  • Manages the RF environment through automatic RF functions like TPC, DCA, RF group management
  • Feeds a real-time telemetry stream and health statistics of all APs in our environment so the can be used by our in-house or 3rd party monitoring tools
  • Facilitates onboarding configuration of new Access Points and managing the inventory of our existing Access Points
  • Enable streaming telemetry to custom Splunk feeds which extract real time radio info and much more than standard software
  • Perform bulk config changes, sometimes via the automated wizard which allows for staggered upgrades
  • Integrate into upcoming SDA fabric to become a fabric WLC
  • Manage and troubleshoot 6Ghz WiFi and high density roaming
  • Integrate with Catalyst Centre/DNAC to facilitate AI-RRM
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.

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