We're planning a network refresh for a Sydney office with roughly 250 staff across two floors, with around 150–200 people onsite at a time. The office will become wireless-first within the next 6–12 months, so reliable Wi-Fi, roaming, capacity, and support are important. We have approximately AUD 200,000 available, dual diverse internet links at 4 Gbps and 2 Gbps, and a refresh cycle of about seven years. The current UniFi network is managed by an MSP, but some staff are unhappy with its performance and the explanations we've received after a recent outage. Our internal team is mainly desktop support and workplace technology staff, rather than experienced network engineers, and we may bring network management in-house. We're considering staying with UniFi or moving to a more traditional enterprise platform such as Aruba, Cisco Meraki, or another vendor. A wireless survey is being offered, but we're unsure what technical, support, licensing, high-availability, interference, and long-term maintenance factors should drive the decision. What would you evaluate, and where does UniFi make sense or fall short in this environment?
4 Answers
There are plenty of real-world deployments with hundreds of users and many sites running UniFi successfully. It is especially attractive when you want straightforward management, good price-to-performance, and no large recurring license bill. I would standardize the design, use proper VLANs and firewall policies, keep a few critical spares onsite, disable automatic updates, and test releases on a small group before broad deployment. Avoid mixing random vendors unless there is a clear reason and someone understands the resulting support boundaries.
The biggest question is who will operate the network when something goes wrong. UniFi is relatively easy for general IT staff to administer, but its support, troubleshooting depth, and some enterprise features are not as strong as Aruba or Meraki. If Wi-Fi is business-critical and there is no experienced network engineer available, paying for a platform with stronger vendor support and a qualified integrator may be worthwhile. Make the vendors demonstrate roaming, client isolation, guest access, reporting, alerting, VLAN policy, firmware management, and failure recovery using your actual requirements.
With a seven-year lifecycle and a wireless-first office, I would compare total cost over the full term rather than just the purchase price. Include subscriptions, replacement hardware, support response times, professional services, monitoring, training, and the cost of an outage. Meraki or Aruba may be expensive, but their support and operational tooling can reduce risk for a small IT team. UniFi may still be the right choice, but get a formal design and support proposal from multiple integrators instead of relying on informal opinions or the current provider’s recommendations.
Ask each vendor to document the bill of materials, warranty terms, licensing for every feature, expected support response, spare-parts plan, and what remains usable if the cloud service or internet connection is unavailable.
UniFi can handle this size of deployment, but the decision should be based on support and operational capability rather than raw throughput. A properly designed system with a wireless survey, redundant core components, spare switches and access points, controlled firmware updates, and clear escalation procedures can work very well. The hardware itself would likely cost far less than AUD 200,000, leaving room for design, installation, spares, monitoring, and internal training. Aruba and Meraki generally offer a more mature support model, but their licensing and hardware costs are considerably higher.
The survey is essential. AP count depends on wall construction, glass, neighboring networks, density, and the applications being used—not just floor area. Require a predictive survey followed by validation testing after installation.
Don’t treat a cloud dashboard as the same thing as high availability. Confirm what happens if the controller, gateway, internet connection, switch, or power supply fails, and test recovery before putting the system into production.