[vandot]

My startup purchased Meraki, and we don't have to deal with many of these issues. We also paid an electrician to do wiring and crimping. SDE time is expensive and we want the team focused on building our product, so we made the tradeoff to pay more for the network gear and installation. As a result our entire team, engineering and everyone else, has network access that "just works". This was true when the 35 person team showed up at our last office for the first time, and continues to be true.

The configuration is done through a hosted dashboard that also provides monitoring. We're in a heavily regulated field, and the Meraki dashboard provides a lot of evidence for compliance audits. It also enables us to remotely control devices (e.g. lock, wipe, locate) and ivestigate issues when integrated the Meraki MDM solution.

We did have to tune the bitrate for wireless.

We also cannot setup redundant VPN tunnels to AWS (Meraki only supports one tunnel for non Meraki VPNs), so we have to do manual faiilover. This is my biggest gripe with Meraki. We are investigating adding a Cisco ASA to handle site-to-site VPN to AWS with redundant tunnel support.