WLAN vendor experience, NORTEL???

[gillymonst]

Hi all,

I have a large K-12 campus that I manage using all Nortel wired gear. Central 8600 out to edge 8100's into closet 470/450 hybrid stacks. I have had good experience with the above in an environment of 10,000 students and 2500 administrators.

I have been asked to provide wireless solutions to a segment of out population and see that the consensus here @ tek-tips as of 11/03 was that Cisco had the edge with a more reliable product.

Can anyone tell me if this is still true or should I feel comfortable with the Nortel WLAN products? I'm considering the 2300 series. Looking for reasons why or why not and comparable Cisco product/model experiences if Nortel is still seen as not the first choice.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Auger282]

I cant really say anything about the nortel APs but we are also a nortel shop but we went with Cisco 1200 APs... seems to be the standard.

We also have a mix of Intermec APs for data collection... but I see that Intermec has now ditched their line and gone with Cisco for the wireless infrastructure. (

http://www.intermec.com)

 

[biv343]

I've worked with the 2300 series WLAN product, and it works well. I like the fact that everything is programmed in one place - if you add AP's, just define them in the security switch, plug in the AP and you're done. If you have multiple security switches, clients can roam between the two devices without losing connection. Pretty slick.

My only issue with Nortel wireless is their past history of not sticking with a solution for a long period of time. There was the Baystack 600 years ago, that went away, then the 2250 security switch came out with 2220/2221 AP's, then the WLAN 2270 was released until Cisco bought Airespace. Now we've got the 2300, which seems to be the best incarnation yet. Good part about the 2300 is that it's OEM'd by Trapeze networks, who also makes WLAN gear for other manufacturers. Hopefully Cisco doesn't buy up Trapeze and push the equipment aside like they're doing with the Airespace gear.

Might be worthwhile asking your vendor if they can bring out some 2300 gear for you to play with for a bit before making your decision - I think you'd like it.

 

[anthonyanderberg]

We had 2200 series stuff until the Cisco Airespace buyout at which time we changed to the 2300 series. I'd say the 2300 code lacked a number of features we liked in the 2200 (esp rogue detection) but its improved a lot.

 

[gillymonst]

Thanks guys, I'm really on the fence w/ this one. As biv mentioned, I've seen Nortels way of not sticking with a solution myself and that was a concern.

Anthony, I got this about rogue detection from Nortels site:

"Rogue Access Point Protection: In addition to identifying, classifying and locating rogue APs, the WLAN 2300 system can alert administrators, monitor the APs activity and even contain the threat by orchestrating an RF attack from neighboring access points."

Does this work currently (just lacking in earlier code) or is it still a little hoakey?...this would be a deal breaker in our environment. Good thing is we will be able to bring in some gear to test before we buy anything.

Thanks again for all your input.

 

[biv343]

The rogue detection got a lot better in the 4.018 and 4.111 releases. The updated WMS software is a lot more intuitive now as well.

It still doesn't work as good as the 2200 series rogue detection did - I used to love messing around with the containment features when we were running that.

 

[anthonyanderberg]

Part of my somewhat negative view of the early 2300 rogue detection could be that like biv343 suggests the 2200 (Airespace) products were really nifty. I'd also echo the comments that recent releases have added a lot of little things that felt 'missing' in the first Nortel releases.
We're running 4.1.11 now and it has worked well, although the WMS piece seems a little flaky some times... we try not to do too many things too fast, and that helps.

I think the Cisco pulling the rug out from under Nortel by buying Airespace was a major embarrassment so I'd assume the Nortel/Trapeze contract has a lot more protections built in. On the plus side bringing the incident up in negotiations give us customers excellent leverage on reducing price/support costs.

 

[joelmole]

I work for a large K-12 district, and we chose Aruba for wireless. Their solution uses thin APs and centralized logic and management. The benefits are countless compared to a fat AP solution. It sounds similar to the Trapeze platform, but I have not directly compared the two.

 

[JeroeNortel]

We had 2200 from airepsace to but now we have the 2300 series in place. I'm really satisfied with this product, most of all the authentication based policies is very handy. Also important is the available redundancy (for example 2380 and 2331) and their enormous scalabilty. Sofar we did not experience major problems, although their are some enhancements/fixes needed (voip, guestpass, etc.) In my opinion progress has been made into the rogue detection techniques in release 4. It still can use improvement but detection and containment is very easy and fun
Luckely release 5 is on it's way dealing with these matters. Besides every WLAN company faces adjustments into their code.

 

[neilchapman]

For what it's worth...

Here in North Carolina the State IT (SIPS) department just did a big study on this same topic.

Nortel won all categories and got the contract.

Featues
Performance
Price
etc.

I thought that was pretty impressive. The State IT department is a big Cisco shop so it's pretty hard for them to go w/a different vendor.

You could probably call them and get the details.

 

[gillymonst]

Thanks all for your info...I think we will be leaning toward Nortel.

 

[martinb9999]

Hi,

I'm new to this forum, and was looking for information on the Nortel 2380 WSS's, and 2330 DAP's. We have deployed a large scale Nortel WLAN solution, with 300+ DAP's, and are having major problems on site.

The major problems are as follows;

The WMS software is mis-reporting DAP status on a major scale, namely, 50% are shown as down or status unknown, yet when you check the WSS through Telnet or console, all DAP's are actually up. This occurs on several different OS's.

The WSS's seem to lock up, and you can gain no Console connectivity. The WSS's disappear off the network and there is no layer 3 connectivity. This requires a physical re-boot to clear.

The issue with certain Intel Wireless cards, that will not work correctly on the Nortel solution.

MAC authentication that is added via WMS, when updated deletes 90% of previous entries..

Auto-RF functionality does not work, and won't for at least 18 months.

A lot of these issues have apparantly been fixed in version 5 of the code issued by Trapeze, only problem is Nortel are always 2 versions behind, and so the fixes are not available.

More worryingly is the fact that Nortel knew about some of these problems, long before they sold the solution to our customer. Needless to say, our customer is not very pleased, and is about to rip all the equipment out!

If anyone would like to discuss our issues, or have any advice, please let me know, and I will do my best to assist in any way I can.

Cheers

 

[netmanrick]

If you stay with the 2270 switch & 2230 Ap's(Airespace equipment),try the Airwave AMP management package. Much better than the Nortel/Cisco WLAN package.We habe the Nortel rebranded Airespace units & the Airespace units running side by side with no problems.

Rick Harris
SC Dept of Motor Vehicles
Network Operations

 

[mewi]

hi martinb9999,

we also have nortel 2380 switches and having problems.
(some hang ups one per month, problems with intel centrino cards, especially intel 2945abg)


mewi

 

[Dualie]

Hello,

We also have a nortel wireless shop- 3 2380's in a mobility domain, doing everything from voice with QoS( spectra-link phones ) and webAAA, 802.1x with TKIP and WPA etc.
We had our bumps in the past due to flaky versions of code ( 4.1.11 ) Currently, running 4.1.14 and the only area that is not working to par is webAAA- Splash screen is hosed and can't access the internet through the DMZ.
Waiting for version 4.1.15 and this will directly fix this issue.
So far so good!!
Love the 2380's scalability and WMS wizard is really slick.
Have had good luck with intel 2915abg cards.
Dualie

 

[JeroeNortel]

Dualie,

As I mentioned before in another thread, the web-portal no more works after upgrading to 4.1.14. This seems to be a bug since this release is only ment to be a global regulatory compliance update. If you want use webaaa again, downgrade to the previous one.
Also yesterday the 5.0 release became available on the Nortel site

 

[jdeisenm]

My company gets wireless gear directly from Trapeze. I just upgraded to the latest version 5.0.10 and the compatabilites with the intel 2200/2945 with power management seem to be fixed.

I can't speek to price but the support has been pretty good.

 

[jdeisenm]

The latest trapeze 5.0.11 code worked even better. The intel cards associate fine and the ap's do not reboot.

 

[mewi]

hi,

I am using the 5.0.9.4 from nortel and it works very fine now with the intel 2200/2945/3945 cards.
All Problems my problems are solved with this release