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My company was bought out a couple of months ago. We are now owned by a company with 94 Branch offices currently and growing fast. Wireless is not a great concern to them it seems.

I was in need of a few more access points and requested a 3 pack of Ubiquiti access points as it is a step up from what they were sending me, linksys n750 SOHO routers. At least I would have a management system that is free and works pretty well. We already have a few Ubiquiti APs and it would be easy to add a few more.

Instead, they sent me 3 Aruba APs. Great, these are very very nice APs compared to the Ubiquiti and look forward to playing with them. However, do they have a free WNMS or do we have to pay for the cloud service they offer?

The bad thing is, the company will be making major changes to all of our offices in about 6 months and will be replacing them anyway. Just trying to use the best management system I can in the meantime, hopefully without having to control each one separately .

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks!

Also, these will likely be in 3 different offices that connect to our main office by site to site vpn tunnels.

I would check with whoever sent them to you on what the deployment plan is moving forward.  With enterprise grade hardware from Motorola, Cisco, Aruba, etc..this normally involves some kind of centralized controller or management system.  Was the expectation to have you manage them independently?

I would be surprised if the hardware you received was purchased without some type of management plan.

Thanks for the reply Tom, I have checked with the vendor and am expecting a call back in about an hour from their team. My guess is they did just send it without thought of how to control them. This company outsources the handling of their network. That company installs Cisco 1941w routers and uses that for wireless.

I don't know much about a cisco 1941W but I do know that it can't be doing all that great sitting back in the server closet.

Shame really, so far these seem like nice little access points.