Replacement for Cisco Meraki??
Is this a viable alternate for Cisco products??
I have been installing and supporting networks since the early 1980's. Worked with nearly all media that has been used in SMB installs. I became a great fan of Cisco in Y2K when implementing a WAN for a US retailler with multiple stores in major cities across the US. In 2017 I was contracted by a non-profit to install Wifi in it's 40,000 sqft warehouse. They already had 2 Meraki access points installed, (Which to that point I have had no exposure to). I have always been suspicious of 'plug and play' devices that didnt allow me the exact control of what I was doing. The other think I disliked about the Meraki was that licenses were required to be maintained or else the devices were turned into bricks. I was however impressed by the IOS interface that allowed me to make changes from an airplane seat at 30,000ft once!
I decided based on the current retail pricing of Cisco and Meraki to try out the TP-Link solution in this warehouse on the OC200. My thinking was that even if I did have hardware failures along the way, I could easily and gladly swap out a EAP245 much more cheaply that the Cisco or Meraki equivalent! AND the OC200 still gave me control through my iPhone to monitor and make changes.
I have repeated this in other warehouses and have had great results and so far have only swapped AP hardware out in order to take advantage of upgrades.