If you were deploying all new APs today, N or AC?
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@scottalanmiller said:
If this is only twenty APs, and the only question of comfort is your own (who else is impacted?) how many thousands of dollars are they willing to spend to keep you from having one busy night of plugging in APs?
A couple specific points of note:
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It is certainly not as simple as plugging in new APs. New hardware will have their own mounting brackets. Depending on the architecture, this may or may not be simple to switch.
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It is not a busy night. It will be a busy late afternoon assuming that overnight shipping was ordered. The stated acceptable downtime was 24 hours.
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@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
If this is only twenty APs, and the only question of comfort is your own (who else is impacted?) how many thousands of dollars are they willing to spend to keep you from having one busy night of plugging in APs?
A couple specific points of note:
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It is certainly not as simple as plugging in new APs. New hardware will have their own mounting brackets. Depending on the architecture, this may or may not be simple to switch.
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It is not a busy night. It will be a busy late afternoon assuming that overnight shipping was ordered. The stated acceptable downtime was 24 hours.
True. Good points. Although I assume that IT has nothing to do with mounting them, nor even plugging them in, only in prepping them and doing the IT stuff. Building maintenance, whoever hangs the fixtures and does the electrical and wiring, I would assume would do the the non-IT tasks. In theory, IT might only need to verify things, not even fix them.
So it would be discomfort for someone, but just people who presumably are there to do those tasks. And hopefully wiring is already in place. So it is just the mounting and plugging in, not running new wires. That would add complication.
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It's fly by the seat of the pants - like most SMBs. If the owners have a bad itch - it just gets scratched nearly no matter the cost. By the same token, if they don't see the value in something, they completely ignore it.
Telling them that in our current situation if the controller dies we're down for at least 24 hours and that it costs (Building 1 APs = 7, Building 2 = 11, total 18 * $229 (assuming we went with the AP-Pro that is compatible with our current POE switches) = $4122 They'd seriously consider it, but I can't frankly tell you which way they would lean. Frustrated owners and customers are highly undesirable to the BOD (of course like they would be in any business - but especially so here).
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@Dashrender said:
Telling them that in our current situation if the controller dies we're down for at least 24 hours and that it costs (Building 1 APs = 7, Building 2 = 11, total 18 * $229 (assuming we went with the AP-Pro that is compatible with our current POE switches) = $4122 They'd seriously consider it, but I can't frankly tell you which way they would lean. Frustrated owners and customers are highly undesirable to the BOD (of course like they would be in any business - but especially so here).
The $65 APs won't work with your existing wiring?
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@scottalanmiller said:
The $65 APs won't work with your existing wiring?
The standard Ubiquiti UAP is not on the standard PoE specification.
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@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
The $65 APs won't work with your existing wiring?
The standard Ubiquiti UAP is not on the standard PoE specification.
I know, it sucks. But didn't know if it would work work in this case, even as a non-standard.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
The $65 APs won't work with your existing wiring?
The standard Ubiquiti UAP is not on the standard PoE specification.
I know, it sucks. But didn't know if it would work work in this case, even as a non-standard.
I did try one of these AP's with a different POE switch and it did not work, but I haven't tried it with the switches we specifically have - I suppose I could bring mine in from home and try.
But @JaredBusch suggestion is why I didn't pick the cheaper UAP.
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@Dashrender said:
I did try one of these AP's with a different POE switch and it did not work, but I haven't tried it with the switches we specifically have - I suppose I could bring mine in from home and try.
Oh, that sucks.
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One of our owners wondered by, so I asked him buy now or buy in failure? He agreed that while we don't often loose much if any revenue from reschedules, the massive inconvenience of double booking a day to make for a lost one and delayed payments would make the $4100 fairly easy to spend. But he himself would not want to make a decision, he would definitely encourage discussion from the BOD.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I did try one of these AP's with a different POE switch and it did not work, but I haven't tried it with the switches we specifically have - I suppose I could bring mine in from home and try.
Oh, that sucks.
It won't work. Passive PoE 24v is way different from true 802.3af PoE (48v). There's a transformer directly on two data lines to take the power and still get gigabit througput passive does not negotiate power in anyway, it's just always on. Therefore a PoE switch will never known to turn on the PoE.
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OK AP-Pro with POE is the choice.
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After talking to @Hubtech this morning, he brought up a good point.
Maintaining two separate systems (in my case an old Cisco wireless, and a new Unifi wireless) definitely adds to complications - are those complications worth it?
In my case - after much deliberation - I think they are. Maintaining two systems that once in place barely require any maintenance isn't going to cause me a lot of burden.
BUT, what about companies like NTG (or Hubtech's MSP)? In an MSP setup, it can definitely be worth moving as many client as possible to the same solution to reduce maintenance overhead.
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I would never force a client to change just because we took them over.
So this always makes for supporting multiple systems.
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@Dashrender said:
After talking to @Hubtech this morning, he brought up a good point.
Maintaining two separate systems (in my case an old Cisco wireless, and a new Unifi wireless) definitely adds to complications - are those complications worth it?
In most cases with Enterprise wifi systems. The differences are pretty minimal. Some of your higher end ones have better scanning for rouge networks. It it's really mostly UI differences. Meraki, Cisco, Aruba, UniFi don't really have much of a learning curve between systems.
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As much as having everything the same would help, if you are an MSP, as @JaredBusch said, there's no need to change for sake of keeping things the same especially if the client is not having major performance issues.
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@JaredBusch said:
I would never force a client to change just because we took them over.
So this always makes for supporting multiple systems.
Definitely not. If your MSP is doing that, you should reconsider the choice of MSP. It is one thing to recognize problems that should not be tolerated and forcing change for the convenience (or profit) of the MSP.
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@Dashrender said:
BUT, what about companies like NTG (or Hubtech's MSP)? In an MSP setup, it can definitely be worth moving as many client as possible to the same solution to reduce maintenance overhead.
It reduces extremely little, practically nothing. But, we are rarely acting as an MSP, but an outsourced IT department (similar but not the same thing.) We support our customers, whatever they are using (legally) just like any other IT department. Standardization for financial benefit would be a case by case business decision. But as long as you are putting in quality gear, the difference in cost for someone like NTG to manage it would be almost immeasurable or, at best, unpredictable.
Some products, like Meraki, might cost you slight less to have us manage (maybe $25 less per year for a decent sized deployment) but easily would cost you $10,000 more to deploy. So the management savings for standardization is generally background noise in the financial considerations.
Now if you are installing something in a green field scenario, considering your MSP might make sense. But still has to be kept in context.
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Green field scenario?
Yeah, all that makes since - I suppose the main point was that if something was being replaced or installed new (new implementation) then going with whatever your MSP is familiar with and already has infrastructure for should make things a bit better all the way around.
But changing to a new system just because you have a new MSP, definitely was not where I was going with that statement.
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@Dashrender said:
Green field scenario?
Green Field means there is nothing there already, not even prep work. You are starting from scratch (the field hasn't had its grass disturbed yet.)
Brown Field means there is some work done, maybe just the bulldozer leveling of a pad site, maybe a foundation is started - but something, so you have to account for the existing planning and work, even if you end up having to redo it.
