 I want to do a quick review video of a Meraki MR33. So if you're not familiar, Meraki is a Cisco company and they make watts of networking gear. Specifically this is the MR33 access point that we're going to look at today. Now the first thing I do want to point out is that the box is really nice. It's not the most relevant thing but they well package these devices. And when you flip the device over and we look at the back of it, same thing, the mounting bracket, which I'm going to take off here, well nice, little spring on it. It comes with this little outline here, which has a little piece of 3M sticky. So when you want to align it, you can simply put this on here, put the screw holes in if you need to pre-drill them or just drill them through here. And we have a level in case you want to make sure it's level when you're mounting it as a wall mount. Because unlike a lot of the other devices that I usually review that unifies, this is a rectangle. So there's that. Now pretty nice the way they have it gapped right here with the RJ45 port or a power adapter. So it does not come with a power adapter or a PoE or an injector, at least this MR33 didn't. But it does have an option so you can plug in a wall plug or of course more likely you're going to be using this as a PoE. The next thing we notice in the box, and this is where I think they went kind of above and beyond. I can admit this is pretty nice. This is the screw kit here and I mean this is really nice on the packaging. We have an Allen wrench here. We have the screws that are all individually placed right within this. That's kind of a novel. We have the wall anchors and these aren't cheap ones. They actually feel better than the ones you get like in the bulk packs from the Home Depots and the Lowe's. These actually feel pretty solid for wall anchors. And let me actually use this tool to get these rubber grommets out. So we also have these cushion rubber grommets like to use as washers when you're mounting them. We have these as part of the clip on on there. So this is really interesting. I mean the precision here is definitely the key. This Allen wrench is for to adjust this and this is a clamp down when you mount it with that. And it comes with a little bit of Loctite to keep those from wandering out. So I won't lie, they just do a great job of packaging. Now that's cool and all but honestly this is one of those things where I don't get too excited about boxes. I took the time to show you everything that it comes with. The smaller machine screws, the screws that go in here for the wall anchors. But honestly when it's all said and done you just want it really mounted and you throw this all away. This all just goes in the garbage. It is cool to see all this to see how they have that. I don't think there's anything else in this box here. What else we got? We got a little pull tab here. So what's this? Oh, the book. So we got the start here docs.miraki.com. And I think there's something else here that I need. This tool is really handy for getting all the things out. So now we got this and we got a book with some details in there that I'll probably never read. Wow, that is some really small print. If you don't have good eyes, I'm not old enough to have bad eyes yet. I can read this but the print's really small. But I don't know who really reads the manual. We just go and ask questions in forums and things like that anyways. But nonetheless it's nice the way they did this. Nice the way it's all packaged like this. It's well put together. So hats off to them on design. But of course that's not what you're here for. You want to know what the dashboard looks like. How does it work? How does it function? What does it cost? All those other important questions that mean a lot more to you than boxing. Because we care about packaging. We want to make sure that the product arrives safe and sound. And it looks pretty. I like that they went with this because you don't probably expect this to be on a retail shelf anywhere. But at least you probably want it to arrive nice. It does have these little rubber feet on it. So even without having it mounted to anything, these rubber feet will allow it to sit and not just slide across the table easily. It sits solid. So let's plug it in and show you the dashboard. Because that's the interesting part is how does the dashboard look? What does it cost? How does it work? How does it function? How does it compare? Let's jump into that right now. And for those of you wondering how I'm powering it, I have this handy 48 volt PoE that powers this just fine. And you may have heard of this company before. Okay once it syncs up the light turns green and we're online with it. Now here's a couple of specs on here. This has three radios, 2.45 gigahertz dual band, two stream 802.11 AC and up to 1.3 gigahertz. Interesting that it has an integrated Bluetooth BLE radio, two by two MIMO 802.11 AC wave two, up to 1.3 gigahertz aggregate bandwidth and frame rate. So decent specs on this. This is not a bad, pretty modern Wi-Fi. Now a couple of the interesting features it has is a layer seven traffic shaving and it does have built-in mesh, but I don't have more than one of these so I can't really test any of that, but it claims to be self-configuring, self-optimizing mesh. Now let's jump into a little bit of the details related to this. Oh, also it does have a state fold three through seven firewall. So we'll get into those features when we talk about the dashboard. Let's break down costs a little bit just so we're aware of what these costs and how they work. So the way the Meraki business model is, here's the AP based on what you would pay for it from Meraki. I know there's probably elsewhere you could find it, but the MSRP from Meraki for the MR33 is $7.99. And we scroll down here. As I mentioned, it does not come with an AC adapter or a PUE injector. I'm kind of shocked, but their PUE injector is $149. I don't really understand why it's so expensive, but you could always just get the AC adapter for this if you don't have a PUE for only $29. Once again, these are MSRP prices from Meraki, not from what you would be paying if you hunted them down elsewhere, found them on sale, or this is prices as of October 2018 as well. Now the last piece here is the licenses. And these are not optional. This is how the business model works for Meraki. You get one year for $150 per access point you have. And when you stop paying it, it turns off. That's the Meraki business model. You can save money by buying like a three-year account or a five-year account and you pay these per access point. And they give you discounts based on quantities of access points. But the Meraki business model is there's no management on the Meraki itself. Everything you do at the Meraki is managed completely through their cloud system. And the minute you stop paying the bill is the same minute that it stops working. So that's one of the important distinctions with Meraki compared to some of the other ones. They don't have a local controller. They don't have a local interface. They don't have a separate feature set that you're paying for. Optionally, you either pay for the Meraki in total or it turns off. So you always have to pay. Now, this is good and bad. It depends on which environment you're in. But it's just a consideration for when you're buying these. It's something you have to think about that you will have to pay to keep this thing functioning. And for a business or enterprise market, they give you a lot of nice features. But it's something to keep in mind if you install 20 access points at a client. Well, they have a licensing and price for that that you will be paying annually in renewals to keep those functioning. And of course, you're probably forwarding the cost on to your client and that space. So what do you get for that? Let's jump into the actual dashboard itself. So because of the way the Meraki's work with their dashboard, you get a very clear view of everything in a nice control panel. These systems, auto provision, it's not like some of the other ones where you have to configure them or anything. When you buy the Meraki, you tie it to the control panel for the client. And away you go. Now, these control panels, I'm not going to get real in-depth in, but the short of it is you have your view and you can also share a client view in here. So it does have the ability to set this up so you can have your client see things and manage things and break down different sites. This is actually called LTS test site. It also supports other things like network security appliances and switches because Meraki sells more than just wireless. We're only going to focus on the wireless and the dashboard for the wireless for this video. But as you can see, it's, you know, nice little dashboard has some things on there. Here's my computer connected to it. So the system sees my computer. It says how I'm connected. It says capabilities of my Alpha Generic Linux driver, which I thought was going to cool. It recognizes that I'm using the Alpha. There's one idea to review on. You can find on my channel. I'll leave a link below. USB 3 network adapter. And it says that it's on Linux. So it's got some neat tools built in that says, sees the details of here. Event log. I can see when my client had connected. I'm only client connected to Meraki right now. You can then jump in here. I can say waitlist is blocked group policy. You can apply and it's basing it on each client. A policy to it. So you can apply layer three rules, layer seven firewall rules and traffic shaping rules to it. Currently there's none applied to this. And we'll get into that another menu. The other thing I thought was kind of novel is the system that this is plugged into is called 24 port switch rack. It recognizes a usw is a usw 24 unify switch. So it actually sees the name of the port, the port description, which is studio top port, because the Meraki is sitting in my studio right now and that's the port it is plugged into the top port in a studio. It's referring to this switch panel that's in the studio from we can access it. So it's kind of neat. It's using this to the link layer your LLDP data and pulling it from the switch. But it's nice that it tells me where it's plugged into. So even though it's not plugged into a Meraki switch, I still have some details pulled from the unify over. So I thought that was kind of novel. You have location and I put our address in. So it's on Pennsylvania road here at our office. You have some tools where we can blink the LEDs, reboot the AP ping or ping the AP so we can get back and forth on there. We can run a trace route and we can look at the art table of other things on a network that's connected to it. It also has the ability to take a look and do some troubleshooting for like the five gigahertz radio here. And just general details about utilization and usage. So I think it's some pretty decent tools here. You can look at some VLAN status, alerting status, DNS, DHCP failures. In an event log of just looking through each event like from my system connecting, disconnecting and associating with it. Like I said, I don't have any other clients connecting to this. Now we do have this option for maps and floor plans where we can load in some of this and create layers, satellite view even. There's my building. So kind of cool that it's got that. Air Marshall. This is kind of neat. So it'll find other SSIDs. It sees the other SSIDs in the office, other SSIDs that it found around spoofing malicious broadcasts. So it's kind of neat location heat map. And it will do some heat mapping. I don't have this all configured, but it generally figures out. Okay, this is the heat map of this area. Let me see what else it sees. I'm guessing these are some of the devices around it that it's seeing. Well, let me zoom in any further. Splash logins. Now, I didn't configure all of this, but this is setting up splash pages for the logins. That is an ability it has on there. Now, I thought this was kind of novel, but it has PCI report options where you can do PCI DSS Wire LAN compliance report for not applicable wireless, not applicable the name I have in case you're wondering what that is. When we first set it up, I didn't fill out every detail. So it just put NA or not applicable in some of the spots. Bluetooth clients. So it sees a few of the Bluetooth things that are in the office. That's kind of novel. It's for beaconing and things like that. If you're not from a beaconing, it can be used for advertising and things like that. So it does pick up and notice different Bluetooth clients in the office are a spectrum. And it can look and see what other things are in the spectrum and utilization and interfering APs. So we can see the different ones and what they're interfering and what channels are on wireless health. So health by client by device type. It only sees the one average is less than 10 milliseconds when it checks. So it says I'm healthily connected to this AP right now. Now these are all the monitoring options. Now we're going to go over to the configuring options. So this is kind of neat. It's showing me four and I only have one configured SSIDs, because they show all my SSIDs. You have the potential to configure up to 15 SSIDs. And of course they support a variety of functions. Now, if you notice here, and it's kind of small, but it says Meraki DHCP, you can configure these instead of as it bridging to your LAN. It has its own DTP server built in. So I think can create its own networking per SSID. So you can create a series of different subnets and then there's options to create rules in between here. So certain ones can have splash pages, certain ones can have other features, edit the settings. And you can kind of see going on from here. We can enable the SSID, reconfigure it and go from there. So it's kind of cool and then you can configure every little options. What's a sign-on method? And there's a lot of different sign-on methods that it supports. Access control. Now, this is kind of cool too because this goes back to some of the sign-on pages when you want a splash page. So do you want non-direct access, which we chose, just saying use a pre-shared key, but it does have options for click-through. So users must view and acknowledge your splash page before being allowed on a network. Great if you want a guest network. This is all built into and included with their dashboard. Sign-on for Meraki authentication. Sign-on with SMS authentication. So I thought this was kind of cool. So users under a mobile phone number and receive an authorization code via SMS. After a trial period of 25 texts, you'll need to connect with your Twillow account for network-wide settings. So they give you the first 25 texts and then you have to connect to an account to do it. So it's actually not included completely in a dashboard. It does have Cisco Identity Services. System Manager Enrollment. Only device with System Manager can use this network or billing or paid access. And it has options. I'm not going to go into detail, but they have options for being tying billing systems in with Meraki. Now, this is all being adjusted on a per SSID basis, just so you know up here. Now, this is NATMO with Meraki Bridge Mode, which is what we have so we want to bridge to it on our same network. But then you have other options like Layer 3 Roaming. Clients receive DCP leases from LAN, but use SETIC IPs in Bridge Mode. So you get a couple different options. You can also VPN Tunnel across here, which I thought was kind of cool. And use the Concentrator. You do have VLANs, VLAN tagging that can go on there. Now, the content filtering is kind of cool too. It's only in NAT mode, but when you put it in NAT mode, it does have its own content filtering and firewall options. So you can start doing other filtering options when you have it. So if you want to use this as a guest portal, you would turn those features on and you could say just block these things, social networks, or block other features in the content filtering. So it's kind of a novel that they have the ability to do that. Firewall and traffic shaping. So you are able to add Layer 3 Firewall rules in here. And Layer 2 if you want. So if it's in isolation, you can actually use this, like I said, as a firewall. It also has Layer 7. So you can actually see gaming news, blogging. And then all news, or you want to block certain ones. They have a couple of named places. TechCrunch, MSN, Gizmodo, Fox News. And then you can choose the action of what you want on here. So the policy is deny news, deny all news, or just deny a single news outlet. Now, because you're doing all of this in Maraki's Cloud dashboard, pushing it down, I will make the assumption that the Maraki system keeps us fairly up to date when you're doing all these policies and for some of the Layer 7 routing that it's going to be constantly... Because this is a problem that you may run into, is if you get a device that doesn't receive constant feed updates, that's something you generally have to pay for with most firewalls. Because if you don't get those feed updates, you don't get all the rules you need passed through. So things become outdated, things become irrelevant. Now, other cool things is it has built-in traffic shaping. So traffic shaping rules are per client bandwidth limit. You can set uploads and downloads on per client per SSID bandwidth limits. And it also has shape traffic, enabled traffic shaping. And now we get a new expanded. We can prioritize VoIP traffic, but lower advertising and software updates and online backups prioritize WebEx and Skype or prioritize video music. Or create your own rules and build out some of your own rule sets for different options in here. And they have quite a few options that you can choose from. So you can choose different options and networks and expedited forwarding of voices, multimedia latencies, and create, like I said, defined rules for how you want that traffic shaped. And because I'm not using it, but you do get the whole modern or fluid splash page. What these are is it allows you to create a very custom message, custom splash page for your guests that have to click through and access. So that's kind of neat. SSID of the Meraki 33 advertises SSID, hide this SSID, per availability, enabled on some APs. This gets down to the fine grain control they want to give you. So you can say, I want this SSID across all the Merakis associated with this site or only certain ones, maybe only in the front office, but not in the warehouse area, for example. So you could create fine grain rules and do that. You can also schedule availability. And this maybe only want the guests to work when you're open and maybe you want your guests to turn off when you're closed. So kind of novel. Then we have Bluetooth settings. You've got scanning on or off, advertising on or off. And this is using AP as location markers for information. And they have a documentation. And like I said, this is some of the advertising. So you can create these UUIDs for uniquely tied to things like, Facebook supports beaconing, I believe Google does as well. And what that can do is send beacons out to Bluetooth that are listening on a lot of phones that look for that as an advertising queue going, hey, we know you're at this location because Bluetooth is shorter range. And it can go, we pinpoint that you're at this location and we want to beacon this information to you. And this can be for targeted ads or just generally gathering data and statistics and tying this together with your ad campaigns from Facebook to a lot of other services. And finally, we have the radio settings. It's kind of neat how it works because you have default profiles, but you, it was a little confusing because you can't click on this. This brings you back to the main page. This brings you back to a channel option. This brings you to the target power. You check the boxes here. And if there are multiple T's available, select them all. You check the box and then you go to edit settings, assign profiles. So they have a default indoor, default outdoor. And if you, I think you can scroll down or there's another page here. Nope. There's some other profiles that you can find. I've played with them a little bit. So I've got it currently set to Tom 80s. I wanted to force it to a channel bandwidth of 80 versus auto. So this is the profile and the next, and you can just check these boxes and it re provisions it with whatever custom profile you did. Any other option that was in here, new profile. Here we go. And you can start with one of these profiles here or create a new one from scratch. So open office profile conference room. And each one has their merits of why you would want to do that. And then you can then hit customize and then name it yourself so you can create a profile. And you can assign it to all the access points in an area or just certain ones. So pretty slick. And it also has the ability to just update auto channels. And what this does is going to scan and give you ideas of the channels. Now the last thing I'll cover is the firmware upgrades. So I find it odd that it says beta for the firmware upgrades, but it essentially handles them automatically. I believe you can do some scheduling. So you want to know when it'll do it. So right here's your schedule options. So you can actually schedule when they want to do any device, any type, any scheduler. So you can build your schedules out for this. The other kind of novel thing is you have stable, stable release candidates or beta. So if you want to move these over to a beta that is an option on here and it does have the ability to roll them back when you're doing the firmware upgrades when you're choosing these. So pretty neat. That's a pretty good overview of how it works. Now what do I think of the Meraki overall? I don't think this is a bad product. I've said this before. I think Meraki makes a pretty good piece of hardware. I'm less thrilled about it from the standpoint of you have to pay licenses or it doesn't work. And of course you're subject at that point to completely whatever changes that are made by Meraki. If Meraki decides the license renewals go up, they go up. You don't have an option. You don't lose features based on turning the licenses off. You lose complete access to the device. But in a lot of business environments, all the extra features, the automatic dashboard and never having to think about hosting or managing your own controllers or updating your controllers, that's what you're in trading for. So is it worth it for you to put everything in the cloud and magically let Meraki handle it? Maybe it is. And that's the decision you have to make when you're doing this. I'll be doing probably some other comparison videos because I know it's probably what people are looking for. Some head to head against something like some of the unified devices. But for the most part, I did some general speed tests with it. I mean, it works as it says it does. I didn't do any long distance testing. That takes a little bit more time and I'll be doing that later. But so far, everything about it, we tested here at the office. It didn't seem to have really any issues at all that I could note. I don't have any way to test the high density. I just don't have enough people to throw at it. But it is a pretty cool system. It does work as prescribed here. So I didn't find any gotchas with it. I didn't find any unusual systems. As a matter of fact, I got to say it's really easy because when you don't have to think about having a control or anything, you just give the money to Meraki $150 a year and it just works. So there is that. It's not a ton of money. But when you start looking at some of the deployments we've done that are very large, that I've done for Unify, where we talk about having 40, 50, 60 units deployed. Well, now you start talking about 40, 50 times that license fee, which does go down at scale, but it still can add up. And we talked to people who are looking at other options because they go, wow, my Meraki bill right now is $15,000 annually every year. So it may be completely worth it to them, but it may be worth it to look at something that does have a locally hosted controller option. But again, I'm in all the layer 7 filtering built in. Pretty cool feature if you didn't want to, if you didn't have a firewall that did some of those features, being able to do it right at the access point per guest network, pretty slick. Being able to support 15 SSIDs, also pretty slick. So those are my thoughts on there. Go ahead and check it out. I'll leave links below, but obviously Cisco Meraki is well documented and easy to find information on. Thanks. As we've learned with YouTube. Anyways, if you want to contract us for consulting services, you go ahead and hit LawrenceSystems.com and you can reach out to us for all the projects that we can do and help you. We work with a lot of small businesses, IT companies, even some large companies, and you can farm different work out to us or just hire us as a consultant to help design your network. Also, if you want to help the channel in other ways, we have a Patreon. We have affiliate links. You'll find them in the description. You'll also find recommendations to other affiliate links and things you can sign up for on LawrenceSystems.com. Once again, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.