This is a good example of what I was thinking. When it comes to cost the Mikrotik boxes are less than the 1 year maintenance cost of the enterprise vendor. So in theory I could replace the entire population of Mikrotiks every year and still not incur the initial $250k investment of the enterprise solution.
In my past job, I spent almost 10 years working with literally thousands of MikroTik devices. My only concern with your plan to use the HAP AC Lite is that the 2.4ghz radio is dual chain, while the 5ghz is single chain. In a high density environment, that single chain may cause you issues depending on how much attenuation you get from walls on 5ghz. With the scripting available on the MikroTik devices, automating configuration is really easy, all it requires is a web server and a database. You have the MikroTik do a web call to the web server with its MAC address as a parameter, and you either return a config script that you customize based on the database, or return a set of variables from the database which the script parses and uses to configure itself. They have recently added TR-069 configuration as well. Also, with as flexible as the MikroTik devices are, you could actually broadcast a neutral SSID as well as a room specific SSID, having the neutral SSID go back to a core router, and having the MikroTik do a private network for the room specific SSID. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss.
