Nevermind la. He already said he just helping and start learning about PoE and stuff.
Is quite a learning curve if you are just starting from acronym.

He got IT guy flying over. Don't need to sweat for some MNC who can afford Meraki.

Thanks for the insight. I'm really a WiFi noob.
Mind me asking some question about Aruba?

I did like their Instant AP mode in ArubaOS 8. But since ArubaOS 10, it seems like this feature is gone and they went full cloud like Cisco Meraki and Juniper Mist AI.

I would like something that allow self hosting the controller without appliances, like Ruckus Unleashed or self hosting Cisco WLC9800 / eWLC.

My exact question:
Is it still possible to run ArubaOS 10 AP without cloud or hardware appliances? Preferably like IAP mode in their version 8.

Thanks yo

Who is the cost center for all these thing? If it's your cost center I believe you can ask for a review and justification for using the Meraki.
I'm personally not a fan of Meraki. Why buy Meraki when you can buy Cisco?
What a Meraki can do that a Cisco cannot?
At least Cisco device will keep working until it dies even if you stop paying.
Meraki stop working the moment you stop paying.

However, do keep in mind you don't need skill to configure Meraki. Cisco is a very different story.

Thanks a lot. It's a no go for me then.

There's no monthly licensing fee for Cisco. You either pay for DNA, SWSS, smartnet, and some other support option.
It sounds like you are paying for MSP instead of dealing directly with Cisco.

A lesser known thing about Cisco is this:
You don't need to pay them a cent to get security update. Call TAC and quote PSIRT. They will hand you a new version of IOS XE.

So sounds like someone is milking you.

Remind me of this insurance company with a datacenter.
Everytime this guy want to do something, he either want a new phone or a new watch.

Another one:
Hardware has an excessive high failure rate for fans.
Turn out someone pocket the fans to sell them.

blacktubi
I went over Aruba portfolio and found the 735 to be the same spec and league as the Cisco and Ruckus I compared previously.

Even when you buy in bulk of 5, the per unit cost is still more expensive than Cisco

Their post ArubaOS 10 product is really... Expensive

https://www.cdw.com/product/hpe-aruba-ap735...ss-poin/7982210

Hi there, thanks a lot for posting the quotation in Ringgit.
After doing the currency conversion, it's like USD 8 cheaper, which means the website pricing is accurate.

I'm not buying from them right now, I just want to know roughly who is cheaper, or rather more worthy between Cisco, Aruba and Ruckus.

By the way, is the 505 running ArubaOS 8 or 10?

EDIT:
Found the answer for this question:
Do HP charge extra for self hosting?

HP not only charge you licensing fees to do on-prem, the recommended server spec is 40 cores and 512GB of RAM.
Yes. 512 freaking gigabytes or RAM.

Seriously is Aruba that cheap or good? I never use them in the past but they sure sounds like a joke when big boy like Cisco allows you to download and run their Catalyst 9800-CL controller free of charge, just like Ubiquiti. Full features.

EDIT 2:
Answered this question too:
Do you know if you let Aruba Central license lapse, will it continues to function? As in the ability to configure the device and it will continue to pass traffic. It has to be legal of course, meaning it's not a license violation.

Once you stop paying, things stop working.
Starting with WiFi 7 AP, ArubaOS 10 is a must and Central is the only way to go.

This applies for all their gateway, switch and AP product as well.

Conclusion:
You pay through your nose, owns nothing and suppose to be happy about it.
Since I won't buy Meraki, I won't buy Aruba too.

This post has been edited by kwss: Jul 19 2025, 05:18 AM

Straight away complain to MCMC. This is the easiest to proof.
Check all your bill from the last 2 years and see what is stated as your TV package.
You can even downright accuse them of illegally preventing customer from switching provider.
Don't forget to also accuse them of scamming customer for penalty fees + deploying scare tactic.

Astro do have rm150 for 800mbps.
Just try the same method but with 800mbps instead of 500

Just tell the technician to leave the new ONR at your door. I didn't change anything during my 2Gbps upgrade.

Can you try traceroute from your VPS? Is it also using Equinix SG or SGIX or some other ASN?

You gotta excuse me but I kind of lean towards skill issue on this one.
You cannot assign static IP directly on PPPoE interface. This is an issue specific to Malaysia telco for their insistence of using PPPoE.

To workaround it, the telco will add a route in their BNG to forward your static IP subnet to you. It is a very ugly hack.

On your side, you just need to dnat and snat the IP address and it should work.
I am not sure about Meraki but on Cisco you can assign it directly on your loopback interface if this is what you want.

Frankly I am not even sure if the Skyworth can do it. Maybe you post the instruction or the steps here?

Can you also give me a description on your invoice on what is the 30Mbps service for RM899?

Now come to the final horrible part. Did your Vietnam IT guy actually flew over? If he did and you got billed for it, ask for your money back!
In Meraki, everything is cloud managed and you do not need static IP at all. You don't even need public IP and it will still work.
He could have just setup everything and leave whatever services that requires the static IP to be configured later via the Meraki dashboard from Vietnam.
But in your picture, nothing is connected.

That's DE-CIX ASEAN.

If it breaks again do trace from both end and compare if they are still the same.

When time comes during a hardware refresh and they really mandate Central, just switch vendor.

It sucks to re-learn the CLI from start but it's what it's.
If you don't use the CLI then it's even easier.

Can even consider TP-Link Omada if you just use basic feature. Like very very very very basic feature. For that price I feel it's quite good.

At least they don't feed GPS, barometer reading and all the IoT sensor data back to Aruba. It's crazy the amount of data being collected. They claim accuracy to within 1 meter and their barometer sensor is so good it can know which floor it's on.

They also have something like Cisco Space where they track user movement by combining data from different radio, in the name of giving you insight for user behavior in retail outlet.

I do not want my vendor to know when I'm in office. Hell no.

But Meraki is 100% cloud. There is no on-prem for Meraki at all.

Login to all your ONR, set them to bridge mode and disable the WiFi to reduce interference.

Login to your Unifi Express and scan for the quietest channel. Verify if it's running 80 or 160 or 320 MHz.

But I personally don't have good experience with Ubiquiti product. They have a lot of compatibility issues / bugssss and took almost 2 years to solve them.

Never heard of them before but I'm surprised they have a product with 170Gbps firewall performance. Let's assume that's 1500 byte packet, you still have 56Gbps for 512 byte packet.

For home use maybe ask blacktubi
I don't know anything that's cheap enough for home use other than Mikrotik, TP-Link and Ubiquiti.

Mikrotik POE portfolio is almost non-existence. Configuration wise it can be a learning curve for people without networking concept. RouterOS is feature rich but you must be careful which feature you really need to use because many of them will kill performance.
Using QoS absolutely burns CPU and kill performance.
Using PPPoE will disable L3HW Offload.
Exporting NetFlow / IPFIX to your SIEM / network monitoring tool also disable hardware switching on top of disabling L3HW Offload.

It's also limited by the switch chip to CPU link. So your theoratical max speed is what you see in the block diagram.
It's great for learning network because you do get MPLS, BGP, VXLAN for all RouterOS licensing level. Although they are not as feature full as router used by telco, they still brings you quite far.
However, routing faster and faster internet speed makes me rethink them.
You also can use Nokia SR Linux as an alternative learning tool if you are focused on datacenter. But it cannot exactly do telco stuff.
Just a note: Mikrotik can actually act as a BNG with no additional cost. Feature wise don't expect Juniper level since you are not paying massive licensing fees.
Here I am comparing product that can actually route real traffic, not emulator.

Ubiquiti is buggy and you are basically their QA. You need to go full set or self host their controller if you only selectively use their Unifi series of product. Don't even try their EA product because they will have no problem discontinuing them as soon as they go to market.
They do sponsor a lot of YouTubers to give rave review which is overrated to me.
Basically they are OpenWRT with their controller binary in it, along with tracking.
They can do what OpenWRT can do, and vice versa.
The tracking is aggressive. All devices phone home, including the controller, even after you disable it in the dashboard. There's a special flag you must push to individual device via the controller to disable the phone home completely. On the controller side just perform DNS sinkhole.

I never use TP-Link before so I cannot comment. I only started looking at their Omada series while looking for WiFi 7 AP. Watching YouTube review only without any personal hands-on experience.
My opinion: Will get the job done.

For the record I used to run Cisco router + Cisco WiFi at home. Yep, the real Cisco with Smartnet.

Then I save money by going Mikrotik router + Ubiquiti WiFi. Still using this setup.

Actually a bit itchy to go Cisco again with their new 8300 Secure Router series released last month. Haha.

POE switch wise I really don't know who is best for home use. There aren't many mGig 60W POE switch even in the Enterprise space. It is a very niche market.

Unless you don't mind settling for 1gig POE switch, which I feel Mikrotik is great. Reason being they do L3 for real.

Ubiquiti, TP-Link and many other L3 switch isn't actually L3 in my book. They only do static route with very limited TCAM and buffer.
My definition of L3 is that it must run BGP. However, none of them can do BGP Flowspec.


Finally, I'm a networking guy. My evaluation don't necessary apply to you.

Based on my very limited site survey experience, if you don't mount AP on the ceiling, you can get good coverage by placing them flat on the table. Maybe TV table or something. Just move them out from the wall and towards the center the house as much as possible.
It should be good enough to cover 2 floor with a single AP.

EDIT:
2 floor coverage need to be at the stairs. So if your house is those very long or wide type, the ceiling AP definitely won't work as good.

EDIT 2:
Maybe I should use the word coverage instead of performance, I mean usable data rate of at least 100 Mbps

This post has been edited by kwss: Jul 23 2025, 12:55 PM

Oh then it is most optimal already. You won't get more coverage by mounting on the ceiling.
Mine also won't cover until outside the gate. I just treat it as a "security feature".

I only run my AP at 80mW EIRP. Having more power don't seems to give much improvement in usage performance but generate a lot of RF.

Tell you one open secret. A lot of Cisco product operates on honor system.
It means you can enable features without actually paying for the license.
I don't think they will kick any home lab door for license violation.
Even if you play by the rules, all Cisco product has a perpetually licensed Network Essential / Network Advantage stack which you can use until the lifetime warranty expires, which literally means never.

So if you like any of them, just buy.
Register an account and you can download IOS XE even without contract.

Another advantage of Cisco switch is this: You can enable all features and they still do wirespeed. Mikrotik is a very very different story.

EDIT:
For noise, look up the model number and their datasheet. Cisco has the best documentation among all networking vendors in the world. Yes, best in the world in terms of documentation. Plus they are all open access!

Or buy Noctua fan and mod.
Or just turn down the fan. I don't think you actually pull that many watts off PoE for home use.

This post has been edited by kwss: Jul 23 2025, 03:51 PM

HayateAyakasi8
Forget to tell you...
If you do decide to get a used Cisco switch, try to buy AP that can fit within the POE power draw.

When I mean Cisco, I mean the OG Cisco, not Meraki or their Small Business branding. There is no way to use Meraki without licensing or subscription.

If you want to use SFP module with Cisco, you must either buy original Cisco, which is crazy expensive, or buy third party module that's Cisco coded.

Both FS and FiberMall allows you to choose which vendor coding you want during checkout.

In the event you really must use non-Cisco coded transceiver, you can find the command to disable the check but some people say it didn't work on all switch.

Alternatively, find someone with a programmer to recode it to Cisco.

If you are loaded, buy your own programmer.