At ITogether we essentially have two offerings when it comes to wireless products for data, voice or BYOD.

One is Cisco based (customer premises based customer owned controller which customer or ITogether manage, or Cisco controllers in our data centre, which again, ITogether or customer can manage) and the second is Meraki based – which is again ITogether managed or customer managed, the difference to the Cisco one is that the controller is hosted by Meraki as a cloud service. We chose Cisco and Meraki for two simple reasons

Cisco is by a country mile the brand leader when it comes to switching and routing in the world. We have masses of experience as a Cisco Premier Partner and a heck of a lot of Cisco wireless experience. However, Cisco has no ‘cloud’ offering for the expensive bit ‘the controller’…..so this is where Meraki comes in….they produce a cloud service (via the Internet) for their controllers. A nice difference to the Cisco offering.

The AP’s themselves are practically identical regardless of Cisco or Meraki. If you look at this photo, we’re showing an older 1131AG Cisco on the right and a Meraki MR12 on the left. They both include Antenna. There are many, many other AP offerings from both Cisco and Meraki, but essentially these are the entry level ones. Asthetically quite simple (white) so blend in with a ceiling tile.

We don’t have a formal ‘schools’ wireless case study on our website yet. However we did complete a 30 AP Cisco wireless roll-out for Bootham School in York in Summer 2011. Other notable wireless customers include Welcome to Yorkshire, and Network Marketing, and Arcadia group and of course we use our own wireless (both Cisco and Meraki) All customers have their own requirements, but needless to say BYOD features heavily with guest access being a high priority, as well as the highest levels of security.

As far as deployment goes, we are able to offer a full service. We do the wireless survey, plan the cabling, do the cabling, project manage the whole thing, install the APs ourselves, configure the controller and switches, vlans etc etc , secure the whole installation (we prefer whenever the budget will allow to integrate our friends down at SwivelSecure to provide stronger more secure wireless guest and employee access) but that is optional.

Then once deployed and ready for use, we monitor (and usually manage) the wireless network for the customer. We use Solarwinds Orion to do this back in our Network Operations Centre here at Carrwood Park 24×7, and also the Cisco WLC or Meraki software.  We don’t charge the customer for any of this and have no plans to ever charge for this. This is an important distinction of our very high levels of customer service.

As far as costs goes. The AP’s themselves are similar price points Cisco or Meraki. It is the controller costs that differ. It all depends on whether you are keen to have one brand over another, or whether you have only a small deployment of AP’s planned. For anything less than around 10 APs, and NO guest requirements, then either vendor is fine as you don’t ‘need’ a controller. For anything between 10 and 40/50 APs then Meraki is the best option as a controller is required. For anything bigger than 50 AP’s then the maths gets interesting and Cisco looks good. Again, also depends on level of service, and whether the APs will be geographically spread. Again, Meraki is great for small sites, but disperately spread. However, we have a very good working solution for Cisco deployed in small home offices or branch offices working over IPSEC VPN. We have a Cisco 5500 series controller with several wireless networks managed from it and several 1131AG APs. For example, I have a managed 1131AG at my own house, and it extends the ITogether guest and corporate networks to my house over IPSEC and it works really well without need to backhaul all traffic back to the controller. In other words I can ‘split’ tunnel to the Internet from my DSL home network, as well as tunnel traffic via wireless back to the company network.

The conclusion is, as long as you know how many APs you need and the physical locations of the APs (i.e one cluster or many, many locations), then we can work out which solution is best price wise. Also, one other factor is that the Mea ‘subssubscription’ model. i.e you pay annually for the access to the Cloud Controller. Technically they are both great products, in fact the best you can buy in the world in our opinion ! Oh, one other thing, we can offer zero per cent finance on Cisco Wireless via Cisco Capital upto 3 years free credit. (subject to status) so again, you can spread the costs.