I recently replaced our Meraki gear with Ubiquiti UniFi Pro. I think I’m in month #2 with the new gear. My Meraki licenses were coming up for renewal and it was obvious the MR12 they used to give out for free was going to have to be replaced. It had trouble handling even 3 users. Licensing fees were higher than getting the Ubiquiti UniFi and their EdgeMAX PoE router.
Doing WiFi mapping I’m seeing a stronger signal than with Meraki and the handoff between access points has been seamless. I put the controller on a small form factor PC that came loaded with Windows 8.1. If I was doing it again I’d consider putting it on a Raspberry Pi.
Maybe not something you would want, but even out of the box the UniFi controller has the ability to act as a hotspot. Our guest network has a 2 hour limit on it (something the Meraki could do too) but UniFi can also take credit card transactions through Stripe for daypass purchases. I was using Square for those, and the idea of getting all our financial transactions into a single place (Stripe) makes reporting easier and makes our accountant smile. I haven’t gone live with that part yet, but in test mode it’s working well.
Echoing Alex’s comment about the router, I have essentially the same router but it has power over ethernet (PoE) built in to make it easy to power the access points. I grabbed one on Amazon for $179 (EdgeMAX PoE). A tip on configuring it: before you do anything else, upgrade the firmware to the latest version. It includes a setup wizard that covers most scenarios a cowork site might want, including load balancing/sharing Internet from 2 different providers.
I did find Meraki has better stats and usage tracking out of the box, but it wasn’t something we really needed, and the Ubiquiti forum community can be a good resource. That’s something that was lacking with Meraki - not much in the way of documentation.
Realizing I’m straying from the original request - what do people think of Meraki, let me get back on topic. I started off with their complimentary MR12 unit you get for attending a webinar. Insert drug dealer joke about “the first one is free”. Sure enough, due to a 12" thick brick wall, I needed a second unit for proper coverage. Now the Meraki rep tells me how the MR12 is just a demo unit and should never be used in a real production environment. This doesn’t jive with the listed specs, btw. I got an MR16 with 2 year license from eBay. For comparison, the MR12 and UniFi are similar - both 2.4GHz radios. The MR16 and UniFi Pro are both dual band 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios, so this may help your comparison shopping. The MR16 worked fine, and maybe if I had two of them the handoff as people moved between floors would have been better. Unfortunately, upgrading hardware and renewing licenses would have been out of budget, so I moved to Ubiquiti.
Glen Ferguson
Phone: 301-732-5165
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://coworkfrederick.com
Address: 122 E Patrick St, Frederick, MD 21701
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On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 3:06 PM, Alex Hillman [email protected] wrote:
I don’t have much to say about Meraki other than that I was underwhelmed by the hardware during the test run we did. Obviously, based on other people’s experience, your milage may vary! Wifi is complex, and performance depends on lots of things…from density of the walls/floors to the number of other wifi networks in your proximity and how well/poorly they’re configured.
In terms of Unifi, you want the UAP Pro access points. The basic ones are single band, are slower, have much worse range and capacity. We currently put a couple on our network to see if they could help improve some of our weaker areas but most devices would “prefer” to connect t the dual band Pro access points.
You def want to run the controller software, it makes a huge difference.
One more thing - I’ve been meaning to post here but we recently upgraded to Unifi’s EdgeRouter Lite and it’s AMAZING. It’s incredibly fast, even when our network has a few hundred devices on it. I honestly cannot believe it’s less than $100. It’s a little complicated to get up and running, but worth the effort!
-Alex
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On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 2:30 PM, Jeran Fraser [email protected] wrote:
Thank you all, especially Alex for all the helpful info on just about every aspect of putting a cowork space together.
I have read several threads about Unifi and also some that chose Meraki. It sounds like the overwhelming majority agree that Unifi is the best solution from a cost perspective. I would love to hear what some people think about Meraki, as GCUC had several people raving about the product, but licensing fees seem to price out a majority of spaces.
Also, with Unifi what is the primary difference between the basic Unifi and the Unifi Pro system. The basic is around $80/unit with Pro closer to $200. Thanks again to all of you for your help. This board has been extremely educational for me over the last 12 months and although I rarely communicate, I definitely appreciate all the helpful information!
Jeran
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