Just thought I would come back and update this post.
About 4 months ago I performed the upgrade with all new Zyxel equipment.
In recap I was dealing with a six story 107 room hotel/Inn with concrete floors and steel frame construction. The Internet connection is a 50Mb cable internet modem via Time Warner business class offering.
The previous equipment was all Netgear, with an FVS336g router, 5 eight port 100Mb PoE switches and 16 WG302 access points. This had been OK, but as people now connect their phones, tablets, kids stuff as well as their computers we just started having lots of issues. The other issue that we had was that a large portion of the building had poor wireless coverage. Originally we could not run AP's to the upper floors because those floors do not have dropped ceilings and the WG302 is not really designed for mounting in the open.
Going forward I wanted to support wireless N (was not concerned about AC at this point), as well as doing both 2.4 and 5 ghz.
I installed the following equipment:
1 NXC2500 wireless controller
1 ZyWall 310 - really just used as a router
1 GS1900-24E managed Gigabit switch
6 GS1900-8HP managed Gigabit PoE switches
31 NWA5123-NI Dual radio N access points
When I got all of the equipment the wireless controller has a bad power supply, however I was able to use a spare power supply from one of the AP's to do initial configuration. Zyxel sent me a replacement power supply right away. I had no other quality issues.
I staged everything before hand to figure out how to configure these things. They certainly are different and I worked with the Zyxel support to figure out some of the issues. That was a mixed bag, I kept having to have my sales contact intervene to get timely answers from support, but in the end I always got the information I was looking for.
I made one time consuming mistake during my configuration. When you are managing the AP's with a wireless controller you configure the AP to boot from the controller, it then downloads a new image from the controller. However once configured that way you can only mange the AP via the controller. I was going through a box of AP's and setting them up, after I got through 15 of them I realized that when I thought I was programming their IP address I was programming the address that they were going to use to contact the controller. At this point there is no easy way out. You cannot reset the AP to a default state. To fix this I had to configure the Wireless Controller (WC) to be the address that each AP thought it was, then boot the AP, let it discover the WC download the new firmware, then through the WC I could configure the AP to go back to unmanaged mode, which means handloading the original firmware back to the AP. All in all fairly time consuming. At least I had not changed all of them!
After doing a very scaled back trial setup in my house I was able to determine the configuration for all of the equipment and pre configured everything. During my staging time I had the maintenance guys run new wiring to support the new access points. Then on a weekday in the off season we shutdown the old network and installed all of the new equipment. Other than having a few address mix ups (which were easy to find because I could see the addresses via the new managed switches) the bring up was uneventful.
Even more important it all just worked! Given that the lodge is in ski country and we just spent all winter getting hammered with snow, the place has been packed every weekend and the new network has worked flawlessly. We now regularly have 200+ end points and 6000+ concurrent connections at any given time. We used to get complaints all weekend about the network, since the install there have been zero complaints. You used to only be able to stream Netflix when the lodge was empty, now you can stream Netflix on a Saturday evening.
The new network has been up for 4 months, during that time we had one instance where we had service provider issues, after they were settled there was still a problem and we had to reboot some of the AP's to clear things up. The WC made it so much easier to reboot them, before we had to go into the ceilings and power cycle the switches to reset the AP's on a given floor.
Originally I had planned on using the filtering controls to limit bandwidth hogs, but so far it has been unnecessary, we have not had any issues. It is great to finally have visibility into the network with the managed switches so I can see where the traffic is coming and going as well as having a central point of control for all of the AP's in the past I had to manage the 16 APs individually that would be a real pain with 31 APs.
Overall I'm really pleased with the equipment and how well it has been working. All of the floors now have good wireless service (because they just look like smoke detectors they don't look bad on the open ceiling floors), and we have had zero customer complaints about the Internet service.
On top of everything else this was a real bargain, I would not have been able to do this with any other vendor for the price we paid, everything was on the order of 9K total.
I would recommend that anyone consider this equipment if they are doing something similar.