Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN Reviews

The flexibility, since it's a cloud service, is the most valuable feature of this solution. As well as:  

• The administration 
• Management of the whole platform 
• Development
• Deployment options in the cloud

There is only one particular thing that needs improvement. Sometimes, for example, when you need to open a ticket, although it's under the umbrella of Cisco, you still need to go to the Meraki support. We had issues with Cisco in general. We have multiple platforms from Cisco but when it came to Meraki, we thought to go to another support team to open a case. That's something that might be improved. My opinion and recommendation would be that when you open a case at Cisco, Meraki should be irrelevant. You should have the same support experience just as we have with Cisco.

In the next release, they should improve the way that you engage support. Once you engage them, they are quite knowledgeable and they are okay. There's no issue with that. 

It's stable. In terms of our users, we have guest users and such. It might be that on a particular day we have about a thousand clients and devices connected to the platform.

It's scalable. 

The technical support is good. We never had any particular dispute. From the technical point of view, the technical support is fine. The only thing is the thing that although it's Cisco, you have Meraki dashboards. 

We did have another wireless solution that was made up of bits and pieces from different vendors and obviously Meraki was one of the vendors that integrated everything together. So you had one platform from one supply manufacturer. That's a big plus for them.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. As always in technology, you have difficulties. It was normal on the second deployment because it was in phases. You will always have failures but that's normal.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten and would recommend it. 

We primarily use the solution for our customers.

The solution is easy for deployments. As we are an integrator, we sometimes have several levels separating the customer and our work. With this solution, the customer can look at his environment, and we also have the right to monitor it and to configure it if we need to from our end.

The functionalities are quite professional and complete. It offers good integration with other Meraki products, like switches and the firewall. You can get an overview of all networks and the host. It's really great; nobody else can do that.

Some operations can be quicker within the solution. When it is deployed and registered on Meraki cloud, when you move, for example, a device from one customer to another, you need to un-claim the device from Customer A, and then claim it to Customer B. This process can take one hour. If they could shorten this time to about 10 minutes or so, that would be ideal.

The commercial version of the solution could be cheaper.

The stability of the solution is good. It's stable almost all of the time. We haven't experienced any crashes or anything of that nature.

The solution is scalable. It's very easy. If a company grows, we just have to do a few clicks and it's ready.

Technical support is good. We're satisfied with them so far. They're very interactive, knowledgable, and quick. 

The initial setup was straightforward.

We're an integrator. We handle the implementation ourselves. Sometimes we may need support from Meraki directly for very specific keys and some expertise, but it's very rare.

The price is quite high, but it does have higher functionalities as well. You pay a lot, but you get a good product. Still, it could potentially be 10-15% cheaper than it is.

We pay a yearly subscription. It's my understanding that you can pay for one, two, three or five-year subscriptions. There aren't any fees above that.

We use the public cloud deployment model. 

I'd recommend the solution. It does depend on what the organization needs, however.

I'd rate it nine out of ten.

We are using Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for enterprise access in our building.

I have been using Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for approximately five years.

The stability of the Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is very good.

Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is a scalable solution.

We have approximately 300 people using this solution in my organization.

The technical support from Cisco is good, but they can improve themselves in some areas. Sometimes it takes a while to provide a solution or an answer to our problem.

The deployment of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN was simple. It took a couple of weeks to complete.

We have certified people that do the implementation of the solution.

The price of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is per unit and it has annual maintenance costs.

I rate Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN an eight out of ten.

I've worked on this solution for a couple of clients who already had it deployed. It has many good features and good integration. This is more of a hybrid setup where the switch takes over a lot of responsibility depending upon what you have deployed. It takes a lot of control and allows for cloud-based management of your Wi-Fi network.

One of the key problems is that, similar to a solution like Ruckus, if you lose connectivity with the controller, your Wi-Fi network is immediately impacted and users are unable to connect to the network. It's a challenge because then your budget inflates as you have to invest in a high availability kind of solution and have more than one controller. If you are spread across a large area geographically, then you may want to have multiple controllers at different sites so that if one fails you always have a backup to go to and you're not dependent on the links that connect to your offices. It can become costly as a result. 

There is nothing much that can change but I believe the hardware could become more economical. The licensing part is okay, and compared to other cloud-managed Wi-Fi's, Meraki is well placed on the pricing, but the hardware costs a bomb. If they could reduce the price of the hardware, the access points, that would be a great benefit for them.

The solution is stable and more secure when you compare it to Ruckus because if you have an MX firewall, you automatically get the firewall features over your Wi-Fi as well. The outcome is that all the data passing through the Wi-Fi definitely passes through the firewall. 

Meraki is quite scalable. 

Thanks to my experience with Wi-Fi, I haven't needed tech support from Meraki. One good point about Meraki and Cisco overall would be the documentation. It's extremely comprehensive so that you don't need to call tech support unless you encounter a specific problem, and you can find most things by doing a Google search.

I believe the initial setup is pretty straightforward although I've never deployed the solution - I've managed it for clients. We currently have three companies that are using this product. From a maintenance perspective, it requires a couple of maintenance staff to keep a tab on the solution, depending upon your work environment. 

Licensing is on an annual basis and there is also the hardware inventory. If the firewall goes down, for example, that could cause a problem. The point of failure and the work involved around it makes it a more costly solution.

For anyone looking for a simple management solution in a geographically spread-out network, Meraki is a good bet compared to Ruckus. However, they lose points on the cost as well as on the complexity of its multiple-tiered structure, where you have an MX firewall or a switch, your Wi-Fi access points, and then the cloud. It's too much and could be as easy as having the cloud and access points, but the product has an additional tier integrated, which makes it somewhat complex.

I would place them at eight out of 10. 

We're using Meraki for our AP. We're also using Meraki for our SD-WAN.

The visibility of the site is most useful.

Its licensing can be better.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is pretty stable.

We have scaled it. There is no problem.

We have 230 users, and they don't even know that it exists.

It is straightforward and very easy. It is basically plug-and-play.

It is very quick. It probably takes more time to actually do the physical installation. 

I did one site myself. The rest were done by others. They were IT guys.

We have four people for deployment and maintenance. They are SMEs or system specialists.

Its price is okay for an enterprise. Its licensing is the most painful. If you hear anything bad about Cisco, it's about that. We're supposed to be one of the resellers but had to come back down to become a user. It's really bizarre.

We did evaluate other options. It was a long ago.

I would recommend this solution to others. I would rate Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN an eight out of 10.

• Centralized management
• Easily configurable

We implemented Meraki APs across our 5 offices in USA, UK, and India, and we can manage all of them from one dashboard. We have great metrics for bandwidth usage, easily finding out who is downloading movies. ;-)

Using Radius server for user authentication is very simple to configure, creating new SSID, and it has a great alerting system.

2 years

Deployment is very simple- just add the device to your dashboard, connect to the network, and it will automatically connect, update firmware, and update configuration to match with your others APs.

Nope

No

10

10, to get help you can open the case or just call them directly, give them your customer ID and boom, you are talking to the tech who can see all your devices.

Aruba, Ruckus - they are ok, but you need to spend more time to configure and their support is not even close to Meraki.

Can't be more simple

In-house

I think the Meraki APs are very cheap, I am using them even at home.

Don't waste time and money for the other solutions, only Meraki!

We are primarily using Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for applications.

Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN has benefited organizations by meeting their requirements.

I have been using Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for approximately three years.

The solution is stable and reliable.

The scalability of Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is good.

We have used technical support for some issues but not many times.

I have found Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN easy to implement. It can be done in a very short time.

We have a three-person technical team that does the implementation and support of the solution. The team is mostly engineers and architects.

There is an annual license required for the solution.

We evaluated other solutions before Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN.

I would recommend this solution to others because it's reliable, stable, and easy to implement.

I rate Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN a nine out of ten.

We use Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for enterprise wireless and hospitality wireless. We're using it to cater to all customer needs.

The cloud manageability feature is valuable. We can access it from anywhere. We don't have to get customers remote connections, we can simply log in using the internet, and they're easy to manage.

It would be better if they enable full integration with Cisco's cloud-based network in the next release. A couple of years back, we did an integration with Cisco Identity Services Engine. There we had some integration issues. Cisco had access in the portfolio, but Cisco Wireless wasn't fully compatible with that integration. If we sell Meraki, we can't promote some other Cisco products because there's a clash. 

I've been using Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN for around four years.

Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is a stable and reliable solution. We have a dedicated team to perform maintenance.

Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN is scalable. We have some customers that own 100 branches and they're connected. There was no issue regarding scalability.

Cisco's technical support is good.

The initial setup is straightforward. It took us a few weeks to deploy, not much.

We implemented Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN as we're an integrator.

The price is on the high side when compared to Aruba. We pay for Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN on a yearly basis.

If you need a simple feature set, you can use Meraki basically without any issues.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN an eight.