The Wi-Fi industry has a dirty secret that nobody wants to talk about. Enterprise-grade equipment—the gear that's supposed to deliver reliability and performance—is actually holding back innovation.
The Lock-In Problem
Every major vendor wants you locked into their ecosystem. Cisco wants you all-Meraki. Aruba wants you all-HPE. Ruckus wants you all-CommScope. And they've built their entire business models around making it painful to leave.
The result? MSPs are stuck saying "no" to perfectly good deals because the customer has the "wrong" hardware.
The Real Cost
Let's do the math. A typical MSP loses 2-3 multi-vendor RFPs per quarter. At an average deal size of $50K annually, that's $100-150K in lost revenue per year—just because you couldn't support mixed hardware.
Meanwhile, you're paying premium prices for single-vendor management tools that only work with one brand.
The OpenWiFi Alternative
OpenWiFi changes the equation. It's an open-source, vendor-agnostic control plane that works with hardware from multiple manufacturers. No more lock-in. No more lost deals.
But here's the catch: raw OpenWiFi isn't enterprise-ready. It needs hardening, support infrastructure, and operational tooling that most MSPs can't build themselves.
What This Means for MSPs
The MSPs who figure out multi-vendor management will dominate the next decade. The ones who don't will keep losing deals to competitors who said yes when they said no.
The question isn't whether to go multi-vendor—it's how fast you can get there.