Free Cisco Meraki Wireless AP From Cisco

BaroUK2 · 19 Oct 2017 at 23:38

Posting this here in case somebody is interested, read below for requirements...
https://meraki.cisco.com/tc/freeap

Full-time IT professionals can receive a FREE Cisco Meraki MR access point (AP)* with a 3-year cloud management license. While Cisco Meraki webinars are open to all audiences and while APs may be offered at live events, to be eligible for a free AP, participants must:

Attend the live event or the live webinar in its entirety

Provide a valid company name and website

Be an IT professional working in one of the countries listed below and have an active role of managing, maintaining, or monitoring their organization’s network infrastructure, and be employed by the company

Not be a partner, reseller, or consultant

Register with a shipping address in the US, Canada, the UK or the rest of the EEA, Croatia, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, or Puerto Rico. We cannot ship free APs outside of these regions and cannot ship to post office boxes.

If from a European country, provide a valid VAT ID for shipment.

Register with their company email address

Confirm satisfaction of the above requirements and shipping address with a Cisco Meraki representative by phone

Free AP’s are not available under this promotion for partners, resellers, or consultants, and the promotional AP’s may not be used for resale or distribution. Limit one free AP per organization and per individual.

By accepting the AP you represent that you are authorized by your employer to accept the AP and that you will disclose receipt of the AP to your employer as and if required. Cisco Meraki reserves the right to not fulfill your free AP shipment in the event that the promotional AP is not certified in your country, or it is unable to clear customs at the time of shipment. The recipient is responsible for taxes and duties, if any. Due to abuse, we cannot provide promotional APs to individuals who register with yahoo, gmail, hotmail, and other email domains not registered to your company. Please speak directly to your Cisco Meraki rep if you have any questions.

Please note that U.S. K-12 schools and public libraries are not eligible to receive a free AP after attending a webinar. Instead, these customers can request a product evaluation.

* the exact model of AP will be determined by Cisco Meraki, in its sole discretion.

bledd · 21 Oct 2017 at 23:34

Yup

These are awesome, the trouble is after 3 years, it will stop working.

But you can't argue with the price

Oh Ed not again. · 21 Oct 2017 at 23:40

After 3 years, it's OpenWRT time.

Hyburnate · 21 Oct 2017 at 23:49

Too bad I'm exempt

crinkleshoes · 22 Oct 2017 at 00:43

bledd said:
Yup

These are awesome, the trouble is after 3 years, it will stop working.

But you can't argue with the price

It's a good offer if you qualify yes... but when you compare them to Ruckus they're a waste of time

Avathar77 · 22 Oct 2017 at 00:45

randal said:
After 3 years, it's OpenWRT time.

Can these be put on openwrt?
I had a MR18 which I have away for free but still have a poe switch from couple of years back.

Hyburnate · 22 Oct 2017 at 13:31

crinkleshoes said:
It's a good offer if you qualify yes... but when you compare them to Ruckus they're a waste of time

It's a good way in though. Plus Merakis dashboard is nice from the small play I've had and it does all integrate.

Agreed, I do rate Ruckus APs

Oh Ed not again. · 22 Oct 2017 at 13:59

Avathar77 said:
Can these be put on openwrt?
I had a MR18 which I have away for free but still have a poe switch from couple of years back.

Yep as per https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/meraki/mr18

I had the pleasure of helping riptidewave test his releases on the MR12, then again on to the MR18. Looks like my wiki page instructions for the MR12 are still going strong too.

crinkleshoes · 23 Oct 2017 at 09:42

Hyburnate said:
It's a good way in though. Plus Merakis dashboard is nice from the small play I've had and it does all integrate.

Agreed, I do rate Ruckus APs

Yeah - their back-end is great and their APs are pretty good in smaller deployments, so for a free AP for home user for 3 years, it's a great offer for sure... it's also good to get to grips with the back end if you're in the industry and haven't dealt with it before.

But I still much prefer Ruckus... even though their management tools and reporting isn't up to the level of Cisco... when you come to larger scale deployments, their self-managing channel and power adjustment is much stronger than Meraki... I also get more throughput from Ruckus APs... I see 300-400mbit across all the important areas of my house.

Funnily I was having a lengthy conversation with a client over Ruckus vs Meraki on Friday even... they have 450 APs over 3 properties and are about to buy another 600 APs... the 450 they have at the moment are Ruckus R500/R700/H510 and they were thinking about possibly migrating to Meraki for this deployment.

Even though we would have made about 2-3x the profit from the Meraki migration, I still advised them to stick with Ruckus.

crinkleshoes · 23 Oct 2017 at 09:43

randal said:
Yep as per https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/meraki/mr18

I had the pleasure of helping riptidewave test his releases on the MR12, then again on to the MR18. Looks like my wiki page instructions for the MR12 are still going strong too.

That's good to know. One of my biggest frustrations with Meraki is that they become an expensive paperweight if you don't pay the subscription.

Hyburnate · 23 Oct 2017 at 14:03

crinkleshoes said:
Yeah - their back-end is great and their APs are pretty good in smaller deployments, so for a free AP for home user for 3 years, it's a great offer for sure... it's also good to get to grips with the back end if you're in the industry and haven't dealt with it before.

But I still much prefer Ruckus... even though their management tools and reporting isn't up to the level of Cisco... when you come to larger scale deployments, their self-managing channel and power adjustment is much stronger than Meraki... I also get more throughput from Ruckus APs... I see 300-400mbit across all the important areas of my house.

Funnily I was having a lengthy conversation with a client over Ruckus vs Meraki on Friday even... they have 450 APs over 3 properties and are about to buy another 600 APs... the 450 they have at the moment are Ruckus R500/R700/H510 and they were thinking about possibly migrating to Meraki for this deployment.

Even though we would have made about 2-3x the profit from the Meraki migration, I still advised them to stick with Ruckus.

I'm not surprised, once you're that far in you may as well continue. The Wave 2 units from Ruckus are good.

I've not touched the Ruckus system for a while now and I'm pretty sure I need to re-train as my original training was on the ZoneDirector platform, with it all moving to VSZ I'm sure it's all changed - would be nice to see some integration with Brocade if it's not already there.

crinkleshoes · 23 Oct 2017 at 14:38

We're just trialing some brocade switches at the moment...

vSZ / SZ does have a newer interface, but it's not really all that much different than the ZD really... just more bloated and slower, with more clicks to do basic things... so in other words, the newer firmware sucks

Depending on implementation... I still prefer on-premises controllers... but then I work with a lot of hotels with VoWLAN.

Hyburnate · 23 Oct 2017 at 19:57

crinkleshoes said:
We're just trialing some brocade switches at the moment...

vSZ / SZ does have a newer interface, but it's not really all that much different than the ZD really... just more bloated and slower, with more clicks to do basic things... so in other words, the newer firmware sucks

Depending on implementation... I still prefer on-premises controllers... but then I work with a lot of hotels with VoWLAN.

Good to know. We have a few customers with brocade at their core and seem very happy with their performance.

Caged · 24 Oct 2017 at 09:27

Brocade switches are garbage

crinkleshoes · 24 Oct 2017 at 09:32

Caged said:
Brocade switches are garbage

why?

Skiddley · 24 Oct 2017 at 13:35

How do you know if you are a partner, or reseller? I can use one of many company email addresses....

We're an Aruba shop - but keen to know more about the competition.

crinkleshoes · 24 Oct 2017 at 14:16

Unless you go through partner accreditation, you would be a reseller.

Although isn’t that one of the non-qualifying things? Try to register yourself as someone who qualifies for the freebie

Caged · 24 Oct 2017 at 18:21

crinkleshoes said:
why?

No end of trouble with bugs causing issues doing routing. Maybe if you shift a load of Ruckus gear and need some L2 PoE stuff then the pricing offered on them makes them a no-brainer, I don't know.

crinkleshoes · 24 Oct 2017 at 18:37

Caged said:
No end of trouble with bugs causing issues doing routing. Maybe if you shift a load of Ruckus gear and need some L2 PoE stuff then the pricing offered on them makes them a no-brainer, I don't know.

Pricing is rather good... about half what I've just seen on Ballicom.

They're coming in around 10-50% more expensive than ZyXel and from initial tests they seem better... but I haven't had one in a proper environment yet.

Only thing that's annoyed me so far is the web interface seems 10 years out of date.

Hyburnate · 25 Oct 2017 at 11:00

crinkleshoes said:
Pricing is rather good... about half what I've just seen on Ballicom.

They're coming in around 10-50% more expensive than ZyXel and from initial tests they seem better... but I haven't had one in a proper environment yet.

Only thing that's annoyed me so far is the web interface seems 10 years out of date.

Who uses a GUI though? CLI FTW