Item: SonicWall SonicWave Series
Rating: 1
Author: Jeremy Robinett

Overall Satisfaction with SonicWall SonicWave Series

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My company has deployed SonicWall Firewall with SonicWave AP's at two companies. Originally the SonicWall WiFi firewall appliance was deployed with the possibility of expanding wifi for these customers. Which was the case. We were told that they will mesh easily into the current production environment. This was not the case. This product is not intuitive and is difficult to add to a SonicWall 300w Firewall appliance. There are other solutions with better cost benefits and user friendliness than this product.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Provide reasonable wifi service when configured correctly
Settings rich for the network engineer
Aesthetically pleasing to the eye

Cons

Detailed setup instructions
Auto Setup Feature for mesh
Provide filters without a yearly subscription

Most Important Features

WiFi throughput
WiFi range
WiFi connections

Return on Investment

Negative effect on time to setup.
Expensive and not intuitive.
Works well once setup.

Alternatives Considered

Ubiquiti Networks UniFi

SonicWall falls short when compared to Ubiquiti. Ubiquiti Networks provide products that are intuitive, feature rich and priced for small to medium businesses. SonicWall is feature rich although you have to pay extra to unlock those features.

Key Insights

Do you think SonicWall SonicWave Series delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with SonicWall SonicWave Series's feature set?

Did SonicWall SonicWave Series live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of SonicWall SonicWave Series go as expected?

Would you buy SonicWall SonicWave Series again?

Other Software Used

Ubiquiti Networks UniFi, Aruba Networks Wireless WAN, Juniper Mist Edge

Likelihood to Recommend

This product does is not intuitive to setup. Having to create Zones and rules just to add a SonicWave AP is simple too difficult, especially when other competitors products are easy to setup. We added this product to a SonicWall WiFi firewall appliance and could not mesh it into the existing ip scheme. Had to create Zones and forwarding rules so employees could use resources on the networks main ip scheme. Other products, such as Ubiquit, are by far more intuitive. Not to mention you don't have to pay for every little feature such as web filtering.

Comments

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SonicWave Unintuitive and Cumbersome