What does this do and why is it thousands of dollars?
From the description this is a small-medium sized business WiFi solution with full lifetime warranty and support. This is quite a deal if you run a business where you want WiFi access for your employees or customers. It’s probably overkill if you run a small coffee shop though – you don’t need ten access points for that.
eta: I just looked up the controller (the big flat metal box thing) and the access points (little roundish white things) and separately they are many times more than this bundle. The controller is $750-1500 (depending on whether this is the older version or newer version) and the access points are $250 a piece – this bundle comes with TEN of them. That’s about $4000 of equipment plus the lifetime warranty, next-day service and lifetime support. I’m not a small business owner and I don’t really know any, but this is really an excellent deal. In addition to business, this would be ideal for a medium-sized church, a small/independent school, a neighborhood community center or small town government offices.
what a weird woot. It’s for someone who needs to spread WiFi across a school or large church or similar building…
WOW! This is a smokin deal if you own a small business & want to save a ton of money. This technology was first brought to market by Motorola as the AP’s are controlled centrally by a controller which means you don’t have to update every access point individually saving time & hassle.
For a home owner, this is over kill unless you are lucky enough to own a 15K sq. ft.+ home. I remember this used to be a $25K-$30K solution & now Woot has it for $1,600. I guess I’m getting old as I also remember HP selling Superdome storage arrays of 1TB that cost $1.6M!!!
Whoops, I meant brought to market by “SYMBOL”, not “Motorola.”
Nope. What the AP’s “go for” and “sold for” are different things. The APs sell for $150 (either model) new on eBay. The controller sells for about $500 new. So you aren’t getting $4k worth of equipment, more like $2k. Still a good deal though if you had to buy all this stuff at once. I work in a 350k square ft warehouse and we have Cisco’s version of this with 12 APs and it covers the whole building, so this is a little overkill for most wooters.
Think of it as a mesh router on steroids.
Back in January Woot! offered products from this line (Controller + 5 AP bundles) for way less.
I picked up a WB7520-100NAS bundle (7500 controller & 5 720 APs) for just $449. I would have gotten the WB7530 instead but I was too late.
This price in this current sale is a large discount off of MSRP, but it is nowhere near as good as the deal from January. These sell with a pretty steep discount all the time and used indoor APs show up on ebay all the time.
NOTE: These package deals do not include power supplies for the APs, so you’ll need to buy a Power Over Ethernet router, some power injectors or a bunch of overpriced wall-warts.
Forgot the last bit:
That said these are awesome and I have perfect WiFi in my house now using just 3 of the APs.