The Cisco 5520 Series Wireless LAN Controller is a highly scalable, service-rich, resilient, and flexible platform that is ideal for medium-sized to large enterprise and campus deployments.
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Cisco Aironet 4800 Access Points (discontinued)
Score 9.8 out of 10
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Currently supported by Cisco, but no longer sold, Cisco recommends migration to the Cisco Catalyst 9100 Family of Access Points, which offer greater performance and flexibility.
I consider that its implementation is recommended for configurations where the amount of access points exceeds 50 devices and the performance exceeds 4 Gbps. In environments where the access point density is less than 10 units, we can use the option of Express Mobility.
Cisco Aironet 4800 Access Points are well suited for a larger office or organization that has multiple buildings that require a larger-scale wireless network. The controller makes it easy to discover and deploy radios in a timely manner. The Cisco Aironet 4800 Access Points are probably not well suited for smaller offices where one radio will suffice.
[It] can improve on the possibility of using the physical controllers with the virtual one.
[It] can improve on the possibility of having site-to-site failover capabilities, [like in the case of] controllers at production go down and controllers at our DR site take over.
The possibility of an app on your phone for alerts and minor configuration of the controllers.
This equipment from Cisco has been dependable and we are able to easily continue to add access points or make changes easily to the Wi-Fi password settings.
We have been operating this equipment for a number of years and it does not give us any issues.
In the dailies activities it's simple to manage a wireless network and also to perform changes: the GUI is well known and intuitive for engineers that know how to operate on Cisco WLC. It has High Throughput and consolidated features such as CleanAir, Roaming supporting natively Cisco ISE authentication methods and DNA Center. It's recommended for Wi-Fi 5 wireless infrastructures.
I give this rating because right out of the box we were able to configure multiple radios in the console and deploy them to our environment in a very short amount of time. The only issues we had was there was a bad radio, which was replaced quickly and easily.
Cisco support is always ready to support and engage in any problem or issue. Starting from the implementation support, troubleshooting any software issue or hardware. Their engineers are engaging whenever we ask for support, keep following up with us, and troubleshoot any problem till we find a solution and be satisfied [with] the service.
Just take your time when setting up the HA pairs as those can be tricky. Also take your time setting up AP groups and make sure they are on all the SSIDs you need to be on.
Cisco 5520 Wireless Controller has better high availability features compared to the others. Also Cisco has a worldwide service center and is located in nearly all countries to offer fast and reliable support in case of any hardware issue. Also Cisco offers more features, for example AVC, CleanAir and TrustSec which the compotitiors don't. And we could use some of our als Cisco APs with the Cisco 5520 Wireless Controller and didn't need to buy that much new APs.
I gave the rating I did because, in my opinion, this product scales very well. We are able to add as many radios as we need to to expand our network to more sites, as we need them. So far, I have not had any issues when installing new radios.
Implementing the [Cisco] 5520 [Wireless] Controllers offered us a huge improvement in administrative time over our previous Cisco 3850 deployment. Being able to see all of our APs on a single controller as well as centrally manage them is a great benefit. This also removed the need to deploy specific equipment in different IDFs throughout our Industrial locations and instead only requiring switches with Power Over Ethernet (POE) capability.
Wireless performance has improved with the deployment of our 5520s, which allows our plant operators to do their jobs more efficiently while on the move.
Having three Cisco 5520 Wireless Controllers provides tertiary redundancy for our wireless networks. The solution is elegantly simple. Preventing downtime is, obviously, a profound part of our supply chain capabilities.
