Meraki Go so close but not yet

[TyShawn]

I wanted to take a moment to give some feedback on the Meraki Go product from a small business mindset. Most small business owners are not tech people at heart. They are people who had a dream or giving a service or providing a product so they went forth and started a business. I believe I understand the goal of Meraki Go which is to provide something easy to setup, cost friendly, yet leverage the name and success of the Meraki brand.

This vision is sounds great, but right now it levels a few gaps that doesn't play well for best practices and helping the unknowing business owner. 

1. Guided VLAN support. 

This gap is caused due to the limitations with VLANs still within in the product. As pointed out in my make a wish post the owner wouldn't know about setting up a PCI compliant network until after they have an issue or fail an adit. Guest wifi should always be on its own VLAN (IMO), and VOIP should have its own VLAN with QOS assigned to it. 

2. Guest Wifi enhancement

To tag along with my comment above, the lack of assigning a VLAN to the guest network doesn't sit well with me or follow any best practice that I have been a part of.

3. VPN support

The gap here is there is no built in VPN support either client or site to site. This for me is huge as consumer grade routers have the ability to support this feature but it is missing from this platform. 

One more thing

True phone support even if it's paid for should be an option for a business owner. In a real crunch having someone waiting days vs minutes or hours for support doesn't fit well for the small business owner. I've did install for all types of business sizes, and I can say the loudest customer base were the ultra small and the very large. 

I am not saying the platform is bad or even that I won't revisit this later on, but at the current time (for me) this product needs a little more time to bake.

[Dustin_Hollis]

My bet is, you get what you pay for. I would look at the enterprise products for more features. The Z3 is pretty cheap.

[hidden0]

Hello @TyShawn 

This feedback is truly appreciated. I may not make it here frequently enough, but I do come to the community and try to stay up to date with everyone's concerns.

1. Guided VLAN Support - Improvements are coming! We've made strides not only in improving how you actually create a VLAN (giving it a better home in the app as well), but we're bringing in the required toggles that will automatically build out the requisite L3 firewall rules to truly lock down a network.
2. Guest Wifi enhancement - This is an entirely fair position, and certainly something we can open up. I'll review our present implementation and, given the progress on #1, see what intelligent cross product configuration we can do in the app.
3. VPN Support - We're always looking at ways to improve the GX line, and VPN is one of the most obvious ways we can approach that goal. In terms of VPN, what solutions out there do you like? Other community members have mentioned an IPSec configuration would be sufficient (i.e. client VPN where the GX serves clients connecting in). Do you need inbound VPN support for clients connecting to the GX, or site to site VPN support for the GX to other locations?

And don't get me wrong TyShawn, I know how useful a phone call can be. As such, I've been working with our developers to better understand what steps we'd take in the most common scenarios, and opening up the necessary tools to help you troubleshoot right away. For example, an alerting device being able to link you directly to its' local status page (where quite specific details about issues can be found) to show you without delay what the current problem is.

Thank you, as always, for helping us make the Meraki Go product line into something better for everyone.

[TyShawn]

@hidden0 

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my post. I hope you know my post wasn't meant to be a harsh review of this product, but just an honest review of why I wasn't able to replace multiple sites with company "U" products with the Meraki Go product. As @Dustin_Hollis stated there are other options available on the market and some of my customer were moved to Meraki proper, others were moved to Cisco SMB, and some are still with company "U". 

Let me take a moment to continue the discussion on the topics that were brought up in the prior post.

VPN Support - Ipsec for a site-to-site connection would be enough for me, but I know others might bring up wireguard or even OpenVPN as options as well. For a client VPN OpenVPN or L2TP are options that should work for the majority of the customer base. 

While I have you're attention I would like to ask if it would be possible to be able to come up with a solution that could save some retailers, Meraki, and customers some time and possibly wasted product. The ability to configure a "test" or "demo" site in the app to see if Meraki Go is right for them. I say this as I see multiple posts on this forum, questions and reviews on Amazon, and other sources asking multiple pre-sales feature based questions. In some cases I have seen negative reviews posted due to the post-sales discovery. Which then leads to a return process and ultimately wasted product. 

[hidden0]

@TyShawn 

Sorry for my delayed reply, you haven't lost my attention. There is always talk internally about VPN. We're looking at a multitude of approaches, so your input on what you need specifically is helpful. It echoes what others have said here on the forum.

A demo capability is a great idea. We're doing some project work now that could definitely benefit from an added demo capability. I'm not making any promises, but that is certainly something we will explore.

[jake123]

So it's been about 9-10 months since this thread started. Are Voice VLANs supported yet? I recently put Meraki Go in my home network and have been enjoying the simplicity. Have a new small business office site I'm installing a network in and wondering if MGo might be a solution. They will have 7 voip phone users so QoS is important, but like the op on this thread, they don't have dedicated physical ports at each workstation. Ports are shared with PCs sometimes plugged into the Cisco 8800 series phone's switch port.

[hidden0]

@jake123 The GS110 series switches now allow configuration of voice VLAN on any access port configured.

The GS110 will not allow any QoS configuration.

[AscendLLC]

Where are the instructions on how to use the voice VLAN and configure this for a shared physical port?  I have a single port going to the VOIP phone and then from the phone going to the users computer.  How do I set up the GS110 for this configuration?