Meraki is administered from the browser. And the licence keeps it switched on.

Meraki puts one thing above all others: that a person without deep network training can set up and maintain a network spread across many places without setting foot in any of them. Switches, Wi-Fi access points, firewalls and cameras are configured from the same browser screen, and a new site is brought online by sending the equipment by courier: you plug it in, it calls home and configures itself with the template that already exists.

What it gives up is fine control and independence. There is no configuration file you can save and compare; there is a screen. The deep diagnostics are the ones the manufacturer has decided to put there, and where they are missing there is no console to drop down into. Anyone who comes from writing configurations by hand experiences it as a straitjacket; anyone running forty branches with two people experiences it as a relief.

You recognise it by the kind of client: retail chains, franchises, scattered offices, hotels, companies with no IT department at each site. Where the problem is not the network of one building, but that there are forty buildings and nobody can go to any of them.

Everything is done in the manufacturer's web panel. The equipment keeps a permanent connection to that panel, takes its configuration from there and sends its data there. Templates are the piece that makes it genuinely valuable: you describe what a typical branch looks like and apply it to thirty sites at once, so a policy change is made once and not thirty times.

What you lose: there is no full command line in which to reproduce an odd problem, and the manufacturer sets the pace of the versions. There are diagnostic tools inside the panel — capture traffic, test a cable, see a port's errors — and they resolve most cases. For the rest, the route is to open a case with the manufacturer, and that has to be said beforehand: part of the ability to resolve things sits outside the house.

And the question everybody asks: if the internet goes down, the equipment does NOT stop. The switches carry on switching and the firewalls carry on letting through what they were allowed to, with the last configuration they downloaded. What you lose while there is no line is the ability to administer and to see what is happening. That is acceptable in many installations and a risk in others, and the difference is how long you can go without being able to touch your network.

In whatever is scattered. Fifty shops with four cameras each, one network per branch, a small recorder or recording in the cloud, and nobody from IT at any of the fifty. There Meraki solves exactly the problem that client has, and the saving is not in the equipment: it is in not having to send a person to a site.

At the centre of a large video network, with hundreds of cameras concentrating traffic towards a group of recorders, recovery demanded in milliseconds and a need to tune queues and multicast port by port. It is not that it cannot: it is that there the work consists precisely of going down into the detail, and Meraki's model is not to go down into the detail.

And in installations that by policy cannot depend on an external service to be administered: infrastructure obliged to operate in isolation, plants without a reliable connection, clients whose specification requires all management to be inside. There it is not a preference, it is a requirement, and forcing it ends badly.

Every piece of equipment needs a current licence, and the licence is not an extra: it is part of the product. While it is in force you have the equipment, the administration panel, the updates and the manufacturer's support, all in the same payment. When it expires there is a grace period with increasingly insistent warnings, and if it runs out without renewal, the equipment stops giving service. It is not that you lose the support: it is that that switch stops passing traffic.

It has to be said just like that, because it is the underlying difference with almost everything else we install. A switch from another brand with an expired contract is an old switch with no right to updates, and it carries on working for ten years. A Meraki unit without a licence is a unit that has stopped. Whoever buys this is not buying metal: they are contracting a service with metal included, and it is worth seeing it that way from the first quotation.

There are three practical consequences. The first, the cost does not end at the installation: there is a periodic renewal that goes into the client's operating budget and not into the site budget. The second, the dates matter: it is worth having all the equipment expire on the same day and having somebody with a name and a surname responsible for that renewal, because the warning arrives by email to an address that may have been left without an owner. The third, in a security installation you have to think about what stops if that happens: if the switch that powers the cameras is Meraki, the expiry of a licence switches the surveillance off.

The client, and with little training. It is its greatest virtue: somebody from administration or maintenance can see which shop is offline, restart a port to revive a hung camera, bring the Wi-Fi of a new room online and check whether a cable is faulty. It is delegated by profile, so that whoever runs a branch sees their own and does not touch the others.

The boundary is at the structural things: the design of the templates, the separation of traffic, the firewall rules, the routes between sites and the update window. Those are touched with judgement or broken entirely at thirty sites at once, which is the other side of the coin of administering everything from one panel: the mistake also replicates itself.

And there is a boundary that with Meraki is not technical but administrative, and it is the one most often neglected: whose the panel's organisation is and whose the licences are. They have to be in the client's name, with their own administrator account and with somebody responsible for the renewals. If the panel is in the installer's name, the client does not own their network even though they have paid for the equipment. We put that in writing and sign it, because it is the question nobody asks until they want to change supplier.

On the tone, the same as on every page: if your IT team already works with another brand and handles it well, we are not here to change it. We adapt to the network that is there and only put in what is missing.

We are not a partner or an authorised channel for anyone, and we are not going to tell you Meraki is the best network. We will tell you which installation it makes most sense for, and what that convenience costs, which is the licence model.