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A great solution for schools
October 15, 2019

A great solution for schools

Branden Beachy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Meraki Wireless Access Point

We use Meraki ccess points exclusively in our school district. We currently have about 550 access points spread between 15 locations. Most of these access points are in classrooms, but we also have them in offices, large spaces such as gyms and auditoriums, as well as on the outside. We have been able to cover just about any area we want with some combination of Meraki AP's and antennas, including a bus compound where buses wirelessly upload their surveillance videos every day.
  • The biggest plus for Meraki is its user interface. It is simple and easy to use. It is cloud-based, so you can access it anywhere, and since it is cloud-based, they can add features at any time without me having to "manage" a controller.
  • Ease of installation - Access points can be completely set up in the cloud, without having the device in hand, so the AP can be shipped to remote locations and installed by end-users who don't have to know anything about AP's. All they have to do is clip a few small brackets to the ceiling tile grid, screw the backing plate into those brackets with 2 screws, plug the cable in, and snap the AP onto the backing plate. It is extremely easy.
  • Meraki's layer 7 firewall rules and reporting are incredible. You have very good visibility into exactly what traffic is going through the AP's, and you can also throttle and restrict based on those layer 7 things, as well as normal firewalling.
  • Reporting overall is pretty comprehensive - you can get very detailed information on who is doing what, and what device they are doing it with, and how much bandwidth that is consuming - all in a clean interface.
  • There are some hardware features that seem to lag behind Cisco's other AP product lines. It would be nice if you could have all the features of the top-of-the-line Cisco AP's combined with the Meraki interface.
  • Occasionally you will find some features you need missing, only to find out that it is there, but can only be turned on by tech support.
  • The licensing has been a little complicated with the way they lump all licenses together, but they are improving that system now.
  • 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.
We have used the traditional Cisco wireless products in the past, and while the hardware has always been great, the user interface has always disappointed us with its complexity and unfriendliness. Also, the move to cloud management seems to work well with this type of product, and it eliminates another piece of hardware and failure point in our system. We considered a solution like Ubiquiti, which would save us money, but it doesn't seem to be designed for large scale implementations and lacks a lot of the management features that we need.
Generally, support is pretty good. There are a lot of engineers on the support side that really knows what they are doing. There have been times when it has been hard to get specific information from them, however, and other times when we have found that features that seem to be missing are actually there, but require tech support to enable them, instead of having them on some kind of "advanced" setting page.

Do you think Cisco Meraki Wireless Access Point delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco Meraki Wireless Access Point's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Meraki Wireless Access Point live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco Meraki Wireless Access Point go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Meraki Wireless Access Point again?

Yes

VMware ESXi, StarWind Virtual SAN, Veeam Backup & Replication
Cisco Meraki is well suited for any situation where you need to deploy a large number of AP's, and have limited time to manage them would be where Meraki shines. If you have very specific requirements for very large density or scenarios where you need many different AP models for many different scenarios, then other vendors might have a larger variety of AP models that might suit your needs better.