So you want to install wireless into a 1,000,000+ square foot building built of extremely thick marble, concrete, miscellaneous metals, and numerous sorts of interfering (and moving) exhibit areas. What are your options?
Well, as far as I can tell, I have three primary ways to go after this. I have the full on Cisco corporate solution, which will cost me a lot of money, require me to do all sorts of prep work (including an extensive site survey, and repeated surveys for any new installations), and will force me to run environmentally unfriendly cable all over the place. It does offer me the highest level of security options, as well as many bells and whistles features. The roaming is seamless, but requires controllers to handle it.
Then I have Meraki. Meraki is so dirt cheap it is almost obscenely priced at $50/access point. The cool part about Meraki is that the infrastructure is open mesh and gateway based. The crappy part about Meraki is that their proprietary AP routing protocol does not distinguish between disparate networks, so a Meraki AP on one network designated by SSID1 near a Meraki AP on another network designated by SSID2 will _share_ each others gateways. There is no way to turn this off. This means that, technically, I could setup an AP near other Meraki devices, make my network a pay network, and steal your bandwidth for my own profit. In reverse, if there is an existing Meraki paid network, you merely have to buy a Meraki AP and set it up near the paid network to get access for free. Roamin on Meraki is also a problem. You can roam in a mesh as long as you do not change gateways. If you move between gateways, TCP sessions are broken.
Meraki also uses 10.x.x.x for the DHCP pool, and does not support changing that range. There are some fairly extreme limitations to the technology, but it is by far the cheapest option and the easiest to install. There is no prep work required, if there is a weak spot in your coverage area, you can just place another AP there and it will mesh up with the other devices around it.
Then there is Aerohive. Its as if Cisco and Meraki got together and made babies. It has most features of the Cisco route, but not quite as expensive. It has the option to mesh like Meraki, but for more money. I believe that Aerohive is about $1000/AP but does not require any sort of controllers.
So the question is, how many features do I really need?