Top 5 WiFI Companies In The USA And Why

Today we are going to talk about the WIFI majors.

In 2020 what we are seeing is a consolidation of the Major players who manufacture WIFI access Points. Gartner states nearly 80% of all corporate Wi-Fi sold in the United States comes from these key vendors. eTribeca partners with all of them:

Cisco (who got into wifi early in the 90’s with the purchase of Aironet) and Meraki (Cisco Cloud only Solution purchased in 2012).

Aruba (who was purchased by HP in 2015 and has since rebranded their midline switches as well as all WIFI calling them Aruba).

Ruckus (now part of CommScope as of 2019, who is known for cellular and Indoor Cellular).

Aerohive (now part of Extreme networks as of 2019, who also purchased parts of Brocade switching and Avaya).

Cisco

We could talk about these companies and their respective product offerings for hours. I think if you scan the web you will see much writing about them. This is more about my impression of them as we move into WIFI 6 this year.

Cisco has always been able to keep their position due mostly to having a reliable outstanding product with a 20-year track record and focusing on the high value enterprise customer. The solution in recent years has become more and more complicated and requires attention to firmware updates and changes in client devices for optimal use.

Meraki

it’s the cloud gorilla in the room. It has a nice self-upgrading feature because its cloud but I put it a little like apple, works great but once you want to do something outside of the box it’s difficult to do so. We see people moving into this solution to have flat IT expenses but as whole networks are now being pure WIFI some are considering the other manufacturers either as a further cost-cutting exercise of a specific feature, they can make better use of.

Ruckus

Probably the best head device on the market (AP with beamforming that is hardware and not just software as some of the others do). They have developed a cloud offering so you can switch the hardware back and forth between dedicated solutions (in-house) and cloud. It took them years to get this right and this is there goldilocks period. CommScope have taken a hard hand to them and want to push them more to a wholistic solution inside the rest of the product line. With the best OpenG offering for 3.5ghz in building there is a fit and they should be considered in both indoors and outdoors.

Aerohive

The last of the self-standing wireless vendors that were suddenly sold last year to extreme

Honourable Mention And Up And Coming

Two others Myst (now part of Juniper) and Ubiquiti. Myst has a great virtual beacon for wayfinding and fits in the retail space. We don’t know what privacy issues will come out of Congress or state assemblies in the next couple of years (or even sooner) but they will probably adapt to whatever legal landscape we end up in.

Ubiquiti is an Asian low-cost, value-priced solution. They tried to break out of that market about two years ago but do not seem to have succeeded yet. If you have a small network or Wi-Fi is an add-on to your network, the price point is appealing. That said we tend to find people replace the product once a feature set is needed more. An example is reliable and fast support and WIFI features and updates.

If you have read this far then I think you are noticing a pattern. All the major Wi-Fi providers do an excellent job! You have to build a list of features you are interested in and weigh them by importance. We can help in deciding the solution that is a best fit for you. Contact my team so that we can start the conversation.