Four critical decisions when making wireless infrastructure changes

1. Cost to stay with current vendor versus cost to switch

It is our job as IT Directors, CIOs, etc. to make educated decisions and evaluate everything on the market for the best interest of our stakeholders. I had met with literally every vendor on the market and really narrowed my choices down to two. During the process of meeting and discussing our current environment with various vendors, one stood out for a few reasons as a solution provider we wanted to work with. I was most impressed with their customer centric attitude and direct involvement with us through the process.

They took the time along with the partner to sit down and discuss where we are, where we wanted to be, and asked questions about our district, rather than simply pushing product which we saw from others. They provided a LONG list of other K-12 districts from just our vicinity that showed their market penetration. References were of abundance and everyone we spoke to had given praise.

The number of customers who had been in our same situation and left for this vendor was quite large as well. Other vendors could not provide this scale of references, so it was assuring to know we were moving in the direction of many other satisfied customers. While the upfront cost may be a sticker shock to you when doing a rip and replace, comparing the cost of ownership over the term may surprise you. What I found out was that it was actually a cost savings in the long term doing a rip and replace by offsetting service costs.

2. Controller versus cloud

The current trend in the wireless community seems to be that everything is going to the cloud. For some, the cloud can prove to be extremely beneficial by offsetting initial costs and rolling them into many years. However, for us, we knew we wanted to remain with controllers. Not only did we want more control over our environment and more troubleshooting ability, but also we didn’t want to be in a situation where renewals were not feasible and thus services would be severed. We ended up going with redundant controllers with 40G uplinks to each one. Considering we had a 1G uplink to one controller previously, this has removed a bottleneck in our environment. We are extremely happy with the performance we are seeing.

Previous 1 2 3 Next