Meraki Fleet deployment

[Casey1322]

My company is looking to deploy 40+ MX64s with MR33s on a mobile fleet of buses. Is there anyone out there that has deployed Meraki's in vehicles/mobile fleets? If so, how has it been working? One of our main concerns would be how well would the equipment hold up overtime?

[Adam]

We have some mobile deployments.  I have a few questions. 1.  Why not just do an MX64W so you kill two birds with one stone?  Also, what are you doing for internet in the mobile vehicles?  We have historically used cradlepoints and they have their own capabilities that could overlap with some of the MX line features. 

[Casey1322]

We actually have an MX device that has a cellular connection. It does not have wireless capabilities so we have to add an external AP. 

We are also testing Cradlepoints but we  have everything in place to support a Meraki deployment. Just trying to provide some sort of real world examples to show them that the equipment would hold up and work as well as Cradlepoint.

[Ben]

What makes you doubt the fact that Meraki should not hold up as well as Cradlepoint? 

I'm not saying you should mount it under the bus but when you place it inside it should hold out just as well. 

The only "challenge" would be the receiver you're purchasing for the MX (or even Z3?) device.

Cradlepoint has a wide support of antennas for receiving 3G/4G/... 

It's their core business, so the only thing i could think of is that the reception of mobile networks might work slightly better on Cradlepoint vs Meraki but even that's a guess.. 

I'm also not sure why you would need 250MBps when working on mobile networks, bandwith of 100Mbps should do and in this case you could consider a Meraki Z3 device. 

[davidvan]

@Ben@Casey1322

https://meraki.cisco.com/products/appliances#mx-new

[Ben]

@davidvan i know 😉 

My answer dates back 4 weeks ago from before the announcement =D 

Not there is certainly no issue on putting a Meraki in the bus!

[jdsilva]

In my previous job I rolled out this sort of solution using Digi WR44's and Aruba AP's. Worked like a hot damn. 

As far as using an MX my initial concern is that there's no option for an internal SIM instead forcing you to go with a USB modem. Vehicular vibration makes that a very bad idea in my mind. I guess you could super glue it in, but if only there was an MX with an integrated modem...

We also used Private IP SIMs to do this so our traffic never hit the Internet. Not all providers have this option, but it's a nice solution to avoid IPsec over the Internet. SD-WAN is making this less of a thing though.

[Mike_Rapp]

My organization currently has one Mobile Bus with an MX64 and we have not had but just a few hiccups with this. It is holding up very well with the bus being parked for extended periods of time without use. We are currently using a Pepwave with a Verison sim card for our internet. We are also not using wifi on our bus as we had all the workstation and phone hard wired for better connection as most of our services are cloud based. I have to agree that a MX64W would be a simpler solution, unless you really need a more robust WIFI solution. 

[scrapiron]

I've deployed both Meraki and Cradlepoint. Cradlepoint is going to hold up much better. The IBR1100 is shock, dust, vibration proof. Takes DC power (12-36v) has GPIO options to shutdown after x amount of time so battery doesn't drain out. 

I love Meraki, but if you want a Bullitt proof solution for mobile fleets, you go with Cradlepoint. Now, if I could just get the Cradlepoint to act as a VPN peer to our MX at the office.