Hey everyone,
I am looking for some advice. I'm currently an IT manager at a small to a medium-sized manufacturing business. I inherited the previous manager's decision of having a Fortigate infrastructure. Starting now, we have to scale up the access point infrastructure to cover a 200,000 sq ft. warehouse so that handheld scanners can scan barcodes.
Over the past few years of supporting this business, I have noticed that Fortigates are a pain in the ass to configure. Along with Site-to-site VPN connection is not very reliable.
Fortigate doesn't allow any other brand access point on their network. I've noticed that the Fortigate access points start around $250+. In contrast, Ubiquiti is $100 to $180 depending on the long-range or regular. The cost savings justify switching manufacturers.
The primary commercial/enterprise features we need are:
- Extensive access point coverage for a warehouse, maybe 15 access points?
- A reliable site to site VPN connection
- Regular VPN connections for remote workers
I know two of those can be done with consumer-grade Netgear routers. But controlling up to 15 access points is a specific commercial/enterprise-related feature.
A few questions for this scenario:
- What is a real-world radius or diameter for a 2.4ghz access point? Real-world meaning I'm not going to get a call that there's a dead spot in the corner of the warehouse because some engineer said that the real-world is 230ft (Google). I want to draw up a rough CAD drawing for our electrician. This would help him create cut lists for CAT 6 along with PoE switch placements. Going off of Ubiquiti's website, they have regular Wifi 6 AP's and a Long-Range, which complicates this question.
- My preference the management interface needs to be simple as possible. I would instead like to spend my time helping the company create more efficient systems than fiddle around with a router all day. Are there any other manufacturers that I might be missing out on?
Thanks ahead of time for your advice.
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