Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers Review
June 16, 2025
Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers
The wireless controller of Cisco simplified putting out wireless so we can just place access points out. They're automatically discovered essentially once they're deployed we just place a tag on them and they're ready to go. There's really no additional configuration beyond that. And just very simple.
Pros
- Particularly well I would say especially compared to the previous generation of controllers, it gives a lot of additional troubleshooting logging tools for us to determine problems that didn't exist in prior devices. Where we used to have to send someone out, boots on the ground and physically show up at a location, there's a lot of tools now that we can use to remotely diagnose those problems.
Cons
- The only downside I would say is the GUI performance is a little bit slow, even with a newer 9800, performance still lags a bit even compared to the previous generations. So I would like to see that improved. But aside from that, that's really the only issue that we have with it.
- I mean, return on investment is really hard to quantify. Being in a healthcare scenario, it definitely has very good uptime, very good performance. It's easy to manage, fairly trouble free with a few issues not withstanding. There's really no income based off of it, but it does allow our nurses, nursing staff, our physicians to take care of patients better and more reliably and enables a lot of communication options that we wouldn't have had we not had that controller.
Mostly just Cisco access points, but also DNA center/Catalyst Center previously with Cisco Prime. All of those have been integrated at one point or another. Currently using Catalyst Center, still also using the wireless access points. It greatly simplifies deploying wireless. So with previous iterations it would take far longer to deploy and on top of that it really reduces administrative overhead. Like I said, there's a lot of logging functionality, there's a lot of troubleshooting functionality, packet capture, things like that that we used to have somebody in the field now we can do that remotely sitting at our desks.
It is honestly so easy. I could probably teach the receptionist how to do it. I mean it's as simple as clicking a box and selecting. It does give a lot more configurability compared to previous iterations, 5500 series wireless controllers. You can decouple certain things that may be in a policy or an RF profile or things like that, but I don't use those a lot, but they're definitely there and they would definitely be useful. I could see for some organizations.
Honestly, I haven't used a non Cisco wireless controller since about 2004 when I used to put autonomous APs in. It's the difference between eating broken glass and having a five star meal. I mean there's no comparison.
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?
Yes
Did implementation of Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers again?
Yes
Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers Feature Ratings
Comments
Please log in to join the conversation