As someone who's had to deal with Cisco WLCs/APs, I can't imagine anything more complicated and frustrating to set up and use. Can't download or upload configuration backups without a TFTP or FTP server, the interface is a mess to try to navigate, there's a lot of Cisco-specific terminology that isn't explained so you end up spending a lot of time googling terms to find out that they're things you knew about already.
Then there's running the things. Switching to 40Hz channels screwed up our wireless network until I discovered that iOS devices have problems with bonded channels with upper control. An easy fix usually, but the WLC doesn't give you the option to prefer one or the other; it just randomly picks a channel and then pairs it with the associated channel however. Now I have a dozen APs and I have to manually assign the channels on each one because if I set it to auto it chooses an upper channel 50% of the time.
I had an issue for a while where the APs weren't passing broadcast traffic on my LAN. After a long search, I found tons of documentation on enabling multicast (didn't help), Bonjour caching (wasn't relevant), and so on. What actually fixed it was enabling HREAP on my WLAN, for some reason.
Cisco stuff is probably great if you're spending tens of thousands of dollars and you're a Cisco-certified engineer, or if you're the kind of person to plug everything in and not change any checkboxes you don't have to, but for managing it in an office it's been a frustrating disaster.
Then there's running the things. Switching to 40Hz channels screwed up our wireless network until I discovered that iOS devices have problems with bonded channels with upper control. An easy fix usually, but the WLC doesn't give you the option to prefer one or the other; it just randomly picks a channel and then pairs it with the associated channel however. Now I have a dozen APs and I have to manually assign the channels on each one because if I set it to auto it chooses an upper channel 50% of the time.
I had an issue for a while where the APs weren't passing broadcast traffic on my LAN. After a long search, I found tons of documentation on enabling multicast (didn't help), Bonjour caching (wasn't relevant), and so on. What actually fixed it was enabling HREAP on my WLAN, for some reason.
Cisco stuff is probably great if you're spending tens of thousands of dollars and you're a Cisco-certified engineer, or if you're the kind of person to plug everything in and not change any checkboxes you don't have to, but for managing it in an office it's been a frustrating disaster.