MR57 or 9166?

[Philip D'Ath]

I am quoting up a bunch of APs for a high-density office deployment.

I'm going to run with a 6E AP. I feel safer with an MR57 - but the 9166 is cheaper, and is tri-radio. The 9166 looks both better and cheaper.

But is it more reliable than an MR 57? I will take reliability as my first selection criterion.

Does anyone have experience with either of these APs?

[Jonathan Fourie]

Thanks for the feedback here, I think I am going to throw the CW9164 into the mix to study too. Maybe even the CW9166 is a little overkill, however, we tend to build for a 5 year hardware refresh, so maybe within the next 5 years the additional features may be handy.

[danjns]

I don't think there is any push from meraki to use the IoT sensors in the 9166 as they already have their own IoT sensors available. You will never need more than 1 Gbps over the Ethernet connection unless you're planning on running 160/320 MHz wide channels (which you never will in an enterprise environment).

[CMR]

We are moving from MR42/52 to CW9192/9166 as we move to Wi-Fi6(e). We pretty much skipped Wi-Fi6 with just a few MR44s in sparse corridors.

The 9166s have been good and we do use them in dual 5GHz mode as we have quite a lot of wireless voice devices and each radio should be limited to 10 devices. The only caveat I would say, is that you need to use CAT6a and nothing less for reliable 5Gb connectivity.