How many WLANs support for Meraki

[niwai]

 How many WLANs can support for Meraki? If I need to add one more apart from the default what should I do?

[PhilipDAth]

16, but RF spectrum  wastage starts to increase a lot after 4 (not a Meraki issue, just the way WiFi works).  So good practice recommends you don't create more than 4.

The default screen shows four SSIDs.  If you need another just configure it up.

[niwai]

Thanks. Philip,

But we have a requirement to create 18 WLAN for the organization. They are requested to create SSIDs base on the 18 no's department. Can I go ahead with Meraki or what is your suggestion?

[PhilipDAth]

>But we have a requirement to create 18 WLAN for the organization.

Assuming this is for internal users ...

Are you saying you want an AP to advertise 18 SSIDs?  The performance will be terrible - regardless of vendor.  Check out this article on the huge overhead that will create.

http://www.revolutionwifi.net/revolutionwifi/2013/10/ssid-overhead-how-many-wi-fi-ssids-are.html 

You would be better to create a single SSID using RADIUS and then drop the users into different VLANs or apply different group policies.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Encryption_and_Authentication/Configuring_RADIUS_Authentication_... 

[niwai]

Nope. I need to broadcast 18 SSID with APs and planned to assign 18 VLANs.

[Roska]

Please just reargument to LoB (?) based on the docs shared in this thread. 

[antonis_sp]

Having one AP broadcasting 18 SSIDs at the same time is a bad design, leading to low performance.

No vendor will recommend this kind of deployment.

[niwai]

@antonis_sp 

Only one SSID will broadcast in each division and we have 18 divisions with 18 SSID. We do VLAN tagging for each AP and then AP will issue the IPs from the relevant division subnet pool.

[antonis_sp]

@niwai 

That makes more sense.

Since the dashboard doesn't allow for more than 15 SSIDs, you would then need to create more then one dashboard networks.

Depending on your case, you could go for one network per division or get more creative with the SSID availability feature and assign SSIDs to APs using AP tags.

The best solution however as mentioned above, would be a single SSID with Radius policies.

[Uberseehandel]

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@niwai wrote:

 we have a requirement to create 18 WLAN for the organization. They are requested to create SSIDs base on the 18 no's department. Can I go ahead with Meraki or what is your suggestion?

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Having to have 18 different physical Wireless LANs is a sign that the underlying logical WLAN/VLAN schema is insufficiently refined/faulty.