Meraki Go for home

PrimeAesthetic
Conversationalist

Meraki Go for home

I've been doing a ton of reading online (reviews, here on the forums, etc) and I'm stuck between the following solutions.

First a "Quick" Overview -> The House Layout is a ranch setting around 2800-3000 sqft. There will be two people in the house (1 person working full time and needs reliable internet as they are will be on their a softphone a lot taking calls, making calls, meetings, etc. Crappy internet/Wi-Fi signal makes a really bad experience with making calls via MS Teams/Zoom/WebEx Teams, etc)

 

The internet comes in at the basement that's not in a central location (not in a far corner either but still not in an optimal location). This house was built in the 70's with various updates done to it overtime but no ethernet was pulled to various locations in the house. (I recently just bought this house (1st time home buyer) and I have time to install things before I move in so if need be I can pull network cable at least to the main floor from the basement I can do that). My price range is between 300-800/900ish for a home Wi-Fi network. I don't want to go lower then that because I'm worried that we will have a crappy experience and then I'll have to spend additional money to replace it all. I will also need the Wi-Fi to reach outside to the back yard (so outdoor AP's is a nice plus and down the road in a year or so I'll add 2-4 security cameras.

 

So Meraki Go is something I'm very interested in as I've supported Meraki Enterprise before. Great equipment, pretty good support however the Enterprise licensing is $$$$. With Meraki Go the Licensing is free (I am aware of the additional subscription for additional firewall features). There is no Web interface (last I looked into it about a year or so ish ago), it's just managed by an App (which is fine I can use the app with my tablet's along with my phones) but overall setup looks very easy and the reviews indicate as such. I can create Guest Networks and Home networks. I don't need to be extremely granular with traffic but Meraki go does have that capability to an extent.

 

Equipment I'm looking to purchase if I went with Meraki Go -> Meraki Go Outdoor Wifi Access Point, Meraki Go 5 port Security Gateway, Meraki Go Indoor Wifi Access Point (Two of them) and a Meraki Go 8 Port PoE Network Switch. 

 

Has anyone used Meraki Go for home use and what's your general experience with it? 

 

Also For One of the indoor Wifi access Point and the Outdoor can I set them up in a Mesh/Repeater setup? I want the outdoor one but I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to get an ethernet cable to it from inside of the house. 

 

 

2 REPLIES 2
LouisN5
Here to help

Hi there 

Happy to share my experience. I’ve been using Meraki Go at home for around a year. I live in a large Victorian house and have 4 inside AP’s. Three inside the house  and one in an out building which is our second home office. Two of us work from home and make use of soft phones, teams, zoom etc. Have a fair amount of devices connected including wireless CCTV cameras.
Initially, one of the AP’s in the house was meshed but I’ve since moved them around so they are all wired by Ethernet. Meshing was ok but found on a few occasions that the far end meshed AP’s would stop providing connectivity even though it appeared online in the Meraki app. A reboot fixed. I’ve more recently had a few issues with poor performance but a reboot again appears to have fixed. I switched from TP link as I wanted something which would play better with Sonos and Meraki appears to. From a config perspective there is now a web interface as well as the app. I’ve managed corporate Meraki networks and Go is far more basic but don’t feel there are many features I miss. I don’t use the security appliance as already had a small Cisco ASA firewall. There seems to be very little development in the hardware with no sign of new hardware or support for WPA3 for example. Hopefully this will come but definitely lagging behind other vendors and no real response from support on when this might be. 

HI LouinN5, 

 

Thank you for your reply. That does help with my decision on this. I'm basically Stuck Between a full Ubiquity UniFi Setup or a Meraki Go setup.  I don't need the full control/complexity that Ubiquity provides (even though it will be fun to tinker with it). The Fact it's behind/no word on WPA3 is disconcerting but not a show stopper for me.  You have ton's of devices on the network like I plan on doing (I'll eventually add in security cameras down the road after I've lived in the house for a bit). 

 

Even though there is no WPA3 talk yet from Cisco/Meraki Do they plan on keeping supporting the platform and releasing new features/hardware down the road?