[SOLVED] Office Wifi setup recommendation

[CheezItMan]

I'm an instructor/IT person at a small coding bootcamp. We're moving, virus willing, to a new, larger, office in August. I'm trying to start planning for how to setup the wireless and networking in the new office. We can start from scratch as our old setup of Ubiquity APs and gateway is more than a little creeky.

Any suggestions as to what platform to build on, remembering that I'm not a fulltime IT person who can spend his time maintaining CISCO APs?

I'd like to set the place up with Wifi 6 or at least have it ready for a Wifi 6 upgrade. We need to plan on 20 staff and 100 or so web-development students on site.

 

[USAFRet]

First rule of networking - Whatever can be wired, needs to be wired.
Save "WiFi" for those things that absolutely cannot be hardwired.

 

[vov4ik_il]

I have some experience with Meraki hardware, and it is positive so far. If you can get budget for cloud managed devices it is not a bad option. Managing those remotely is a breeze.

 

[CheezItMan]

First rule of networking - Whatever can be wired, needs to be wired.
Save "WiFi" for those things that absolutely cannot be hardwired.

Yes, but since we have 120 or so people on laptops with no assigned desk, I'm not going to put in wired stations for them all. Most of the office will be on wifi with, hopefully the access points wired into a switch and connected to a gateway.

 

[vov4ik_il]

I do not think @USAFRet attacked your point of having WiFi, it is just a good general practice to wire whatever is wireable (get wiring to the desks and let people plug their stuff in).

As for your question, if Meraki is out of budget, I would go for a good pFsense gateway hardware and WiFi open source capable hardware running OpenWRT or similar for the community support and software upgradeability/customization of it. Once you are done with tuning it will not bother you much if any.