Guess who is eating Cisco’s Wi-Fi lunch | Hacker News Reader

Guess who is eating Cisco’s Wi-Fi lunch

gigaom.com

47 pointsmvs15 comments

The company make WiFi routers targeting large companies and software to manage wireless networks with tens of hundreds of users

I found this wording a bit odd. Why say "tens of hundreds of users" and not just "thousands of users"? Or is that "of" supposed to be an "or"?

After being an engineer with Cisco for 2.5 years I want to say that this article nails it when it says that companies like Cisco get "too big and unwieldily" - unfortunately I feel like it has more to do with their management style than anything. There are companies in this world that are just as big yet make better products, are less wasteful and flat out operate on a smarter level.

There are companies in this world that are just as big yet make better products

I would tend to agree. At 70,000 employees, Cisco is big, but there are plenty out there that are bigger, and plenty with good offerings.

When I used to volunteer for Black Hat, we had one guy from Aruba and he helped set up the wireless access points around the conference, the same access points are also used at DefCon [1]. They are able to provide a lot of insight into the radio signals, where people are, where the most activity is, where there are blind spots and all that fun stuff.

Their gear is small, lightweight and from what I have heard from other people using it, absolutely fantastic to manage.

[1]: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/08/a-first-ever-lo/

Has anyone worked with Aruba's products? I'm not really familiar with their stuff, but if it's better than Cisco...

A lot of sysadmins I've talked with love Aruba products. I've always thought their products cost too much money, but the wifi setups that I deal with max out at 20 concurrent users in a single location.

How does Aruba's AP compare to Ruckus Wireless ? Does anybody know what their pricing is ?

For a 5000 sq.ft office, would people recommend Aruba/Ruckus or a couple of cheap DLink/Buffalo wifi routers running WDS ?

Ruckus claims its products are cheaper.

http://www.ruckuswireless.com/press/releases/20090803-real-c...

We have a few at the office. I've never noticed any network issues and we have a good 20 geeks all in the same room often streaming video. Each with multiple wifi devices.

In addition our net admin swears by them. Thinks they are the best thing since sliced bread.

I've worked with them quite a bit. The controller/lightweight AP setups they have are by far the best, Cisco's is a horrible stack of kinda working (imagine massively giant event where the cisco controllers are having cascading failures causing the controllers to reboot from too many clients associated to the LWAPs). However, last time I worked with the Aruba's, every model of controller supposedly had the same SNMP MIB but with tiny differences in the enterprise tables that made automatic data collection and management a pain in the ass. However, it's hard to beat IOS if you're configuring by hand or script and Cisco's standalone APs are still some of the best if you get the right antennas for your environment. If you want to know more about the situations they were used in (or most other brands of APs that exist), feel free to shoot me an email.

Their stock was at its 52 week low and even after the 20% bump it got today its still closer to the 52 week low. Guess either I missed the opportunity to buy it or it was not doing that well till now given that tech stocks have been generally robust over the last year.

I promise to feel like they were wronged after they fix the Mac vpn client. It's been since 2007.

They just need to stop requiring pointless proprietary extensions to IPSEC, and add support for the open source stacks.

And Ruckus Wireless is eating Aruba's lunch...

Ruckus, Meru, Xirrus, there are a lot of players in the 4th gen wireless space.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com