Thanks to the 178 respondents- from the US, Canada, UK, Netherlands, Australia, Austria, Finland, Switzerland, and Lebanon.
The results can be seen here: http://tolu.na/SeMqEG As a reminder of why I did this... I wanted to see how my own satisfaction and frustration with certain aspects of the WLAN vendors I use stacked up against those of other WLAN managers in the higher ed space. In no way do I consider this survey to be of professional analyst quality, and you could easily make critical cases against taking the results too seriously given the open way in which input was solicited. At the same time, there is a certain degree of validity and the results are interesting. What jumped out at me: - 80% of all of us have single vendor WLAN environments at our biggest sites, 20 % are multi-vendor - Including remote sites, 25% of us use multiple WLAN vendors - Most multi-vendor environments are migrating to single-vendor - Having over 3,500 APs, my environment is among the 11% of those who responded supporting more than 2,500 APs - 96% of us have a controller-based WLAN at our largest site - 7% of us have cloud-managed WLAN in use somewhere in our support scope - Only 55% claim satisfaction with our WLAN management systems - 63% of us feel that we really have no choice for WLANs management - 16% of us feel that our WLAN vendors are more interested in sending features at us than providing a stable management platform, 27% more feel that their WLAN management system is frequently buggy - 33% of us do not provide wireless guest service - 16% of us feel that the built-in wireless guest features provided are worthless, and another 25% think the built-in wireless guest services they have can be buggy and are unimpressive - Around 22% of us feel that we have lost 80 or more hours in the last year to WLAN issues from bugs, code issues, and system defects (not including WLAN management) o Another 33% feel that they have lost at least one man-week in the last year to defects in the WLAN system - Around 18% of us feel that we have lost more than 200 hours in the past year dealing with buggy WLAN management o Another 19% feel that they have lost at least one man-week on buggy WLAN management - Around 37% will change vendors (4%) or will consider changing WLAN vendors (33%) with the advent of 11ac - 81% feel that vendor lock pervades the WLAN space from lack of interoperability, and 49% feel that this sucks - 33% of us are not keen on the thought of unified (wireless + wired) management given lack of confidence in current management systems - 50% like the thought of Unified Networking, but are concerned with the vendor-lock factor - 17% of us rarely believe any performance claims made by wireless vendors - 29% believe that as a minimum, wireless vendors frequently stretch the truth with their claims of superiority over other vendors - 49% believe that there are so many numbers to spin when it comes to wireless standards, marketing departments have great freedom to tell a good story while still not outright lying There's plenty more in there to ponder, and the free-form comments at the end are an interesting read. I know I found this to be valuable, and again I thank all of you who took the time. Happy Holidays- Lee H. Badman Network Architect/Wireless TME Information Technology and Services (ITS) Syracuse University 315 443-3003 ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
