After working in some WISP-like and access environments, I con
corroborate that this is pretty much true. It becomes worse the lower
the SNR is and the more that clients are spread out. It just makes the
'hidden node' problem worse.
Making APs as low power and "local" as possible is good advice. Where
possible, feed everything with hardlines back to your Ethernet
switching environment. If client roaming and client-client traffic is
important, using a central controller that can tunnel 802.11 frames
over whatever wired L2 network you like is a good win. It means that
to clients they can associate and/or authenticate to one AP and roam
from place to place while keeping the same session to the controller.
As far as vendor gear goes, if roaming and client-client stuff isn't
as important, Ubiquiti UnFi is great stuff for the price. Next rung up
in my book would be Meraki, followed by Cisco or Aruba.
Making APs as low power and "local" as possible is good advice
^ Ignoring this advice is one of the biggest mistakes people make. They think "Oh, I'll just drown out the noise", but the problem is almost never how well the clients can see the AP - it's the AP seeing the clients. It's hard to hear anyone talking when you're shouting!
Low power, high AP density, and small channel widths are the way to go. The smaller channels keep theoretical bandwidth lower, but you end up with higher throughput in the end.
One other thing specific to the unifi's - they are meant to be ceiling or wallmounted. They transmit and receive in a cone. They *DO NOT* work well if you set them on a table pointed at the ceiling. I've already seen a half dozen deployments of them done this way, just slapped on tables, and it *does not work*. In one case, moving them from the tables to the walls resulted in a 20x performance increase.
I need to choose a wireless solution for a new office.
up to 600 devices will connect. most devices are mac books and mobile phones.
we can see hundreds of access points in close proximity to our new office space.
what are the thoughts these days on the best enterprise solution/vendor?
My normal advice is fairly vendor independant.
use dual band dual radio APs. 802.11A attenuates much more effectively
in residential/commercial construction so the cells are smaller and
there's a lot more spectrum... you'll attract all macs, as well as ipads
and most enterprise laptops to 802.11a/n
Don't run mixed mode in the 2.4ghz band. drop the output power on the
2.4ghz radios to ~30mw, turn off the 802.11b rates, and increase the
multicast rate to at least 12Mb/s
plan for not more that 50 people per ap (remember the aps have dual radios).
if you're going to use 40mhz channels (and n-rates) do so only on 5.8ghz
where the map coloring problem is tractable.
I used Xirrus before about 2-3 years ago. They are great for
addressing density issues without adding a large amount of APs in one
area. As with any wireless solution, it does have it's limitations. In
our case the building was very challenging with solid concrete walls
on top of lockers on each wall. The number of APs (IIRC they call them
arrays) needed didn't really save us much in the end. One thing I did
not like is that you had to use their power injectors because, at the
time, their arrays needed more power than any switch could provide.
Pricing ended up being the ultimate fall of Xirrus in our environment.
To get the coverage that we needed (real world) they were considerably
more than the early HP/Colubris solution that we ended up with.
I need to choose a wireless solution for a new office.
up to 600 devices will connect. most devices are mac books and mobile
phones.
we can see hundreds of access points in close proximity to our new office
space.
what are the thoughts these days on the best enterprise solution/vendor?
Thanks for your replies.
Ken King
Others have mentioned Ubiquiti- while a great and affordable solution for
point-to-point/backhaul and WISPs, their Unifi product has a ways to go to
be considered 'enterprise ready'. It's at best coffee shop ready based on
their latest updates. Their support is basically their forums (which have
very good participation of both users and vendor folks).
I have made a couple of school installations with Ubiquiti products and they are rock solid for enterprise they are very good. Easy to setup etc. And very affordable.
Why not avoid controllers entirely? I recommend Aerohive. In their
solution, there is NO controller, rather the APs communicate with each
other. (Imagine what OSPF would be like with a centralized router)
