Any Meraki wireless experts out there?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Your electrician won't do basic electrical work? Why do you use him? In the US you'd be in a legal mess using a VAR instead of an electrician for building electrical wiring.
Why do you assume my VAR isn't qualified to do the work or doesn't have subcontractors to do any parts they aren't qualified to do? I don't call mounting APs and installing patch cables and panels in server room racks etc etc 'basic electrical work', but I'll ask him if he does much of that kind of work. I didn't know that all electricians were familiar with ethernet cables, but I'd never really thought about it before.
But honestly, I only wanted some advice on specifying a Meraki system. Instead I'm being told to sack my electrician.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Your electrician won't do basic electrical work? Why do you use him? In the US you'd be in a legal mess using a VAR instead of an electrician for building electrical wiring.
Why do you assume my VAR isn't qualified to do the work or doesn't have subcontractors to do any parts they aren't qualified to do? I don't call mounting APs and installing patch cables and panels in server room racks etc etc 'basic electrical work', but I'll ask him if he does much of that kind of work. I didn't know that all electricians were familiar with ethernet cables, but I'd never really thought about it before.
But honestly, I only wanted some advice on specifying a Meraki system. Instead I'm being told to sack my electrician.
Just shocked that you'd keep an electrician that refuses to do work and that results in you having to rely on a VAR to provide electrician services. Don't you see how weird that sounds?
Sure, your VAR might do things outside of the strict scope of a VAR, that's fine. But you are relying on that - it's an odd thing to do. You've created a dependency chain of needing someone who is not specificity an electrician to act as your electrician while being filtered by being a reseller of a certain product.
Very limiting and convoluted. And it's so weird and convoluted that it is making you seriously consider spending 10x the budget to get around the artificial limitations.
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I appreciate that you may like your electrician and you may like having certain VARs. But you must also see how this is impacting your IT decision making - your providers and products are being governed by who provides electrician services bundled with a technical supply chain task.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Don't you see how weird that sounds?
I'm weird for buying Netgear or Meraki products.
I'm weird for getting an IT company to quote for the supply and fit of the whole solution.
I'm weird for not getting our electrician (who I don't even know) to do the work instead.Fine. I'm weird. Whatever.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Don't you see how weird that sounds?
I'm weird for buying Netgear or Meraki products.
I'm weird for getting an IT company to quote for the supply and fit of the whole solution.
I'm weird for not getting our electrician (who I don't even know) to do the work instead.Fine. I'm weird. Whatever.
It's not weird to have an IT company do electrical work, it's only weird to have that as a requirement. Imagine how limiting it would be if you required any job role to do an unrelated job role to determine your solution.
Think about cars. What if you only bought cars from a shop that also builds garages. You could look at that as a "complete solution" but one is automotive field and one is building construction. Nothing wrong with combining them under one roof, no pun intended, but it is very limiting and you'll be stuck buying a cat model from a much smaller range of choices than normal. The chance of getting the best car for you or even the best garage will be low.
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So the real question is only which Meraki models to buy?
The MR12 has a bad reputation for reliability. That's the one often given away for free.
The MR18 is the general sweet spot. Super fast and solid.
If you need 802.11ac then the MR34 is the only choice.
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One good thing is that while the AP units get more expensive, the support cost does not. So the overall price doesn't go up by the percentage that it may seem. All models are $450 for five years.
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Are you looking at any outdoor units?
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Update:
Meraki messed me around a bit so in the end I've bought a 3 pack of Ubiquiti Pro's to play with, and assuming they're as good as you all say I'll be rolling them out throughout the company.
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@Carnival-Boy sorry about Meriaki, we've seen a lot of that. Little response, no following through on commitments. They like big customers these days, they have high overhead. I think that you will be very happy with the Ubiquiti though!
