The Cisco Catalyst 9800-80 is a modular wireless controller with optional 100 Gigabit Ethernet (G) modular uplinks boasting seamless software updates for large enterprises and campuses, and security with ETA and SD-Access.
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Extreme Wireless Access Points
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Extreme Networks' Wireless Access Points (or ExtremeWireless) are designed to provide performance in the most demanding environments with the latest Wi-Fi technologies including 6 GHz, OFDMA, MU-MIMO, and software-defined dual 6 GHz radios.
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Pricing
Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers
Extreme Wireless Access Points
Editions & Modules
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers
Extreme Wireless Access Points
Free Trial
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No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers
Extreme Wireless Access Points
Best Alternatives
Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers
Extreme Wireless Access Points
Small Businesses
WatchGuard Secure Wi-Fi Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
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Score 9.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cisco Aironet 1800 Series Access Points (discontinued)
Score 9.8 out of 10
Cisco Aironet 1800 Series Access Points (discontinued)
I really like central switching. Central switching is converging all of the tunnels, fewer people can administer the product. It's much easier to scale, it's much easier to configure and it's much easier to get predictable results out of that. I have run FlexConnect before under AireOS. I'm proficient with it. But yeah, I think as a centralized controller it works very well. And I think as building redundancy with regard to not just HA-SSO but with an N plus one design, I think the scheme and logic and architecture of the platform is very well thought out and I don't know what use cases I would find it to be lacking. There's a few things when you drill into it, it actually is not that simple. AireOS I feel like was a lot simpler. I think the catalyst, how it breaks out the hierarchy of configuration requires each of these tags and profiles and policies and how you bring them together. Actually, even though they've decoupled a lot of these elements from how AireOS did it, I think fewer of those features, even though it was less extensible, it was not as easy or intuitive to deploy. So I think the intuition and how you actually construct a 9800, an entry engineer would struggle a lot more in a 9800. So I would not recommend the product if somebody did not already have a good foundation of network engineering.
The Extreme access point solution has been used in the cooperative scenario with VLANs for employees in access through 802.1x authentication and also for guests through the captive portal that allows access of people for a limited time and prior registration. The equipment has great performance and connection speed and supports a high density of users connected at the same time without lag and crashes. The management of this equipment is being carried out through software with cloud management and is accessed by our infrastructure team to configure and monitor alerts.
It is good kind of design with the multiple flow profiles and also location base whereby the long very, I think the traditional controller doesn't have this, so we need to have that specific. Every day is getting the same profile but this have a little bit difference. It's very good with the site tagging and also designing all the location-based requirements.
Ease of use and Management. The process of implementing APs is straight forward and managing the wireless infrastructure is quite simple and efficient.
Coverage: we are very happy with the distance each AP coverages in our warehouses without having any drop issues or over implementing APs.
Cost competitive versus other cloud managed wi-fi solutions such as Cisco, Aruba or Mist.
If possible, please add a column for WAP Name and WAP Model within the 2.4/5/6 GHz radio sections, as we have different models of WAPs in the fleet, and it would be easier to identify WAPs within a building.
We conduct digital exams for our students. If there is a way to identify clients and block traffic for applications like ChatGPT, it would be greatly appreciated. Currently, there is no filter for ChatGPT or generative AI.
We use WiNG still for our WAP's, which is ok to do administrative tasks from, but it could be better. However, Extreme Wireless Access Points is moving everything to CloudIQ, which is better in every way and something we plan to move to soon.
The logo on the access points makes you want to mount the AP's sideways like a diamond because otherwise the logo looks crooked, and that just looks bad, so you have to take extra time sometimes, depending on the mount, to get the AP to look square.
Despite common software and hardware issues this is still the best product on the market for large scale enterprise deployments. Cisco has worked with us extensively to reduce the amount of bugs in every iteration however new bugs are introduced or new incompatibilities always arise with major releases. Thus, while I'm hesitant to recommend the product it's still much better than all the other competitors such as Aruba and Juniper in the WIFi space. There is also extensive integration with DNAC/Catalyst Center and ISE in an SDA deployment. Recently there has been a number of critical issues with the controller software and Cisco has proved themselves to be incapable of timely troubleshooting and diagnosis. This has reduced our confidence in the product and it's current and future stability and maintainability. At it's current state the product is taking up too much of our engineering resources to maintain despite also paying for premium support from Cisco. As such I have reduced by rating as we are likely to look at alternative vendors for our long-term wireless management solution
Extreme Wireless Access Points are easy to manage. They are easy to deploy and install. The hardware and firmware are reliable. There a number of things to be improved since we are still using the WiNG platform, but all of those things will be much better when we migrate to CloudIQ.
Due to our HA set up we have always managed to access our wireless networks without problems, when issues occur. When we have lost access to the GUI, due to internal network problems, console access is always welcomed and brings with it the normal Cisco CLI syntax. From previous versions of CLI, it is now a lot simpler and reflects other Cisco products, making it easier to troubleshoot and navigate when necessary.
Monitoring is very good Seamless integration with Cisco ISE RRM configuration very easy. It has REST API support IOS-XE is very powerful operation system. Multicasting and mDNS features are really good and very easy to configure. It supports Pyats and Genie so getting constructed data from python script calls very helpful.
Extreme Wireless Access Points can support all our devices, even in high capacity areas. They are easy to manage and get basic information. There was a time back around 2017-2018 where people's devices needed to make sure they were using the latest wireless drivers; otherwise, people were having connection issues. Other than that time period, we were able to have fewer complaints from end users.
Support was always responsive and willing to help, but at times did not know when to call it and send a replacement to stop the bleeding. I respect that fact that they wanted to get the solution working, and the wanting to learn more and understand, but at times you cant do that at the expense of the customer.
We are moving into a more unified and centralized design, and the benefits offered by the 9800 compared to the above listed 5520 series and 8500 series of wireless controller is much preferred. The staggered upgrade option is again another feature much improved moving to the new model and management through DNAC
We are running Ubiquiti APs for a separate network need in one of our buildings - which we are also happy with. But the difference between Ubiquiti and ExtremeWireless is vast - I cannot find most of the settings I'm used to seeing with ExtremeWireless in the Ubiquiti GUI. That said - you pay for what you get. ExtremeWireless is about 5x the cost per AP than Ubiquiti is. The reliability of uptime with the hardware, as well as the cloud service from ExtremeWireless, has been fantastic to utilize.
I mean, return on investment is really hard to quantify. Being in a healthcare scenario, it definitely has very good uptime, very good performance. It's easy to manage, fairly trouble free with a few issues not withstanding. There's really no income based off of it, but it does allow our nurses, nursing staff, our physicians to take care of patients better and more reliably and enables a lot of communication options that we wouldn't have had we not had that controller.
Initial expense is high due to pricey hardware, though recurring costs make the ROI better over the long term.
Remote access is fairly simple and we can deploy entire home setups or even small offices very quickly. This is provides good ROI to get the business moving quickly.
