Wireless Conroller

[leyakhath muhammed]

Good Day Sir or Madam,

We are in due of a replacement of our Wireless LAN Controller, we currently use the Ruckus Zone Director ZD3025 to manage our wireless network; APs that we use are the Ruckus R500 a total of 175 APs installed all around campus.

New solution for Wireless LAN Controller

New Access Point to be supported and integrated by Wireless LAN Controller

We have an estimate of about 1000+ users concurrently connected to our Wi-Fi

As for different types of users, we segregate them by different SSIDs for Admin, Teachers, Students, Guests, Endpoint Devices e.g., Printers and for school events. 

So, we have about 8 SSIDs. 

Could you please suggest 

Thanks

[Leo Laohoo]

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@leyakhath muhammed wrote:

New solution for Wireless LAN Controller

New Access Point to be supported and integrated by Wireless LAN Controller

Could please suggest to me

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What is the requirement?  

[leyakhath muhammed]

We have an estimate of about 1000+ users concurrently connected to our Wi-Fi

As for different types of users, we segregate them by different SSIDs for Admin, Teachers, Students, Guests, Endpoint Devices e.g., Printers and for school events. 

So, we have about 8 SSIDs. 

[Leo Laohoo]

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@leyakhath muhammed wrote:

So, we have about 8 SSIDs. 

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That is a lot of SSIDs. 

We have about 30k students and staff and the users are presented with one SSID.  Dot1X segregates staff and student into their respective VLANs.

[Scott Fella]

Take a look at the 9800-L controller that can support 250 access points and up to 500 access points with a license.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/wireless/catalyst-9800-series-wireless-controllers/datasheet-c78-742434.html

As far as access points, look at the 9120/9130’s or else choose one of the other 91xx access points.

[leyakhath muhammed]

How about MERAKI ?

Please advise me

[Sandeep Choudhary · Accepted solution]

here is the comparison between Meraki and Cisco: https://www.peerspot.com/products/comparisons/cisco-meraki-wireless-lan_vs_cisco-wireless

My recommendation would be go with 9800 WLCs and 91xx series APs.

Regards

Dont forget to rate helpful posts

[Philip D'Ath]

In one Meraki cloud organization, you can have up to 25,000 access points.  So that is a tick on scale.

It is hard to recommend an access point model without knowing more, but you can go to this URL, scroll down one page, and use the model selector based on your needs:
https://meraki.cisco.com/products/wi-fi/models/ 

Like @Leo Laohoo I would also consider consolidating the SSIDs for performance.  You generally don't want more than 4 SSIDs.  If Admin, Teachers and Students all have Active Directory accounts, you could use Microsoft NPS Server (a free RADIUS server included in Windows Server) to authenticate the users and return the Filter-Id attribute (which selects a Meraki group policy).  This will allow you to drop them into different VLANs, apply speed limits, firewall rules, etc.

If you want to use iPSK, then Splash Access make a great bolt-on solution for Education.
https://www.splashaccess.com/portfolio/education/ 
If you are using Azure AD or Google Suite the students can authenticate themselves to a portal (uses MFA if you have that setup), and self-enroll their own devices.  You can also create profiles (which pushes the Filter-Id attribute) so you can have different settings for different students, teachers, printers, administrators etc - all using a single SSID.
It is like Cisco ISE, but with a zero missing in the price tag (maybe a couple of zeros).

You can see the kind of settings you can control with Meraki Group policy here (note, only refer to the "MR" column since you will only have Meraki access points):
https://documentation.meraki.com/General_Administration/Cross-Platform_Content/Creating_and_Applying_Group_Policies