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Meraki Controls WLANs From The Cloud: Page 2 of 3

Overall, I was impressed with the Meraki Enterprise Cloud Controller's ability to keep a fairly complex WLAN environment functional at multiple sites. At first pass, everything you'd expect is in the sauce; Meraki auto-manages the RF environment to avoid channel contention and interference. Scalability is pretty good, with hundreds of WLANs possible, each with as many as 1,000 APs, and a strategy for when you need to grow even larger. Easy-to-configure guest portals and walled gardens are a few clicks away. Banning problematic clients is simple. User rate limiting per WLAN, and even some content filtering are possible. The feature list is long, and Meraki's intuitive, uncluttered dashboard makes you forget that you didn't rack a controller or configure an elaborate management system as part of system build.

That said, if you are used to managing a large, complex wireless network, you may find some things missing. Meraki chose to hide some functionality from customers, which makes for a tidy interface but also leads to frustration at times. For example, I wanted to disable 1 Mbps and 2 Mbps data rates on my networks, but no option to do so is obviously available. I also set out to configure 64-bit WEP to see what the key entry felt like, but Meraki allows for only 128-bit WEP in the configuration dashboard. And at first pass it appears that you can't configure more than four SSIDs, which won't be enough for some environments.

It turns out you can do these things, but it requires a call to tech support, which will expose a configuration environment every bit as complex as the other guys. The technicians were friendly and knowledgeable, but it would be nice to have a jump-off to "Advanced Configurations" or some other path that didn't require invoking tech support.

Good And Bad

The Meraki Enterprise Cloud Controller-based wireless system performed as advertised. My wireless clients connected or roamed smoothly every time, with the expected throughput given individual WLAN setups and Internet connectivity (though I did not test the system's QoS capabilities).