Cisco Meraki MG cellular gateways are a cloud managed WAN solution designed to seamlessly transpose a wireless cellular signal to wired Ethernet, providing primary or failover connectivity.
Aruba Networks is a product that is broadly available and there are many implementation partners available to design and implement the infrastructure for you. Aruba Networks is great if you are looking for a partner that offers a broad range of devices. It can keep a multi-location infrastructure simple once the management interface is set up. Aruba is less appropriate if you want to do a simple setup with a few devices where you want to be up and running quickly. The management interface can be a hassle to set up and if you want Azure integration you are better off contacting an implementation partner that has dealt with this before.
We utilize it for those job site trailers, so it is perfect for a small job site where you want to provide that internet coverage to those users of those job sites, especially if they're in a remote location. We've actually even used this as the secondary internet to supplement in case the primary fiber line went down. And in my experience, we've had a site go down and use this as the backup internet and most of our users didn't even know. So as far as cons, I don't really, cost depending on the job site and your budget. That would be, I guess the only thing I would say would just justify not using it, but I don't have any reason to not use it.
A DHCP configuration would be fine, but a fixed IP configuration seems to require a twist in the configuration.
If possible, it's just a subscription. With no initials and just a subscription, I think it's a "feature product" that may convince the superior even if the price is a bit high.
I am happy with wireless and all in one, but I feel that the management screen is old, so I think it is better to renew it a bit more.
Aruba Networks Wireless WAN stacks really well against its other competitors for its features, ease of implementation, and administration. The pricing is very competitive with great vendor support and excellent documentation. The centralized management feature is really good as it provides a single pane of glass for all administrative items.
The only other cellular provider that we've evaluated was, I think it was called Sky Link, and it was a little USB module that plugged into the Meraki MXs and we had nothing but problems with it, which is why we ended up switching to the MG 20 ones.
In terms of scalability, The MG Meraki is unvanquished! As it works on cellular signals, as long as you have the required signal strength, you are connected. Removes the dependency on cables to connect to our ISP. So geographical locations do not affect the scalability of MG. Which is the whole point of having a Cellular to Wired Ethernet Device. And it can also be managed with the web centrally.
The ROI is excellent, over time we have been able to avoid outages even though our WAN provider may have had issues, the switch to LTE via Cisco Meraki MGwas smooth
in locations where traditional lan links were not feasible, like mobile locations, this has been a saver
they can be placed where mobile phone reception is best without LAN
