[BBLISA] Wireless system recommendations, site survey recommendations

[Rob Taylor]

Hello all. I was wondering if anyone out there has hired an outside company to come in and do a wireless site survey for you.
We already have wireless in house, but we may be looking at upgrading or replacing it, and want to get survey recommendations from a third party, not necessarily from a vendor
trying to pedal one company's gear.  Looking for number of ap's and ap placement. The initial survey that was done was "virtual", from blueprints only, and it was not that great. 

Also, on that front, we are looking to see if expanding our existing system makes sense, or maybe look at replacing it. Our facility is mainly one building 7 floors, with, 700 users mostly across 5 floors.
We have a controller based system today, and 50 ap's, which I'm not super happy with. Web gui sucks, and their tech support has been pretty lame, usually not that helpful.
And, 2 years after I bought the controller, they released software I can't upgrade to on their underspec'd controller, requiring a controller upgrade. 

I've been hearing the siren song from the meraki and aerohive guys about cloud based management, (which I wasn't super fond of, even more so in light of heartbleed) to avoid
the double whammy of paying for the controller + licenses and the ap's, which I wouldn't mind. I've already had the "To do more ap's you need to buy a 15 ap license bundle for $6000, and then buy
the necessary ap's" dance.  Aerohive seems to support a local management host/vm instead of cloud, which I would lean towards if I was looking at them.
There  are some downsides to the non-controller ones as well, such as making sure all AP's have the necessary vlans on their ports for the ssid's, and trunking the vlans to all the right locations.
I have a small building, so that's not really too much of an issue for me though, and I could just trunk a bunch of vlans to the ap's up front, and assign them later if need be.

Any vendors people think I should look at? Also, If I'm looking to replace, how is the first gen AC gear? Is it worth considering?

Vendors that I may look at:

aruba
ruckus
aerohive
cisco

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

rgt

Whitehead Network/System Administrator