Anyone evaluated or considering this new wireless company? They have an interesting virtual BLE beaconing technology. Any actual use cases out there for BLE heat maps, etc?
Hi Rob, we are a Mist partner and have installed a Mist system for one Church IT Roundtable church and are about to install a similar system in a second church this month. Neither will be using the BLE features up front but it’s ready when they want to upgrade. However, both are using the Virtual Network Assistant troubleshooting technology that Mist offers.
Are you going to be at the conference next week? Happy to chat more then, or I can get you connected with us and/or a Mist rep if you’re interested in a demo or more information. It’s not necessarily the best system for smaller environments but it’s comparable and powerful with the larger systems. Restaurants and large pet food chains and some large search engine and shopping companies are using it for the tracking potential and the API the whole dashboard has. But it is a subscription much like Meraki in many ways, so if you don’t want an ongoing expense, it’s probably not the right solution. That said all systems have ongoing or eventual replacement costs so it’s more of a features and TCO calculation. There are certainly as powerful wireless systems from Ruckus and Aruba, for example, and add-on BLE options for those if you want them.
Hi David,
Yes, I’m looking forward to my first CITN conference. I’ll definitely look for you. We’ve seen an online demo and will be evaluating a free AP shortly. We’re just starting to think through some possible use cases for BLE. See you soon!
Rob
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Interesting company. First time I heard of it and very Meraki like. Meraki has BLE as well.