If we need 10 AP's lets install 20.

Nerm · December 09, 2015, 09:03:08 AM

What is up with the "kill it with fire" attitude towards installing wireless infrastructure? In my line of work I see it all the time and it is really frustrating. I was in a school recently that had hired a "wireless engineer" to design/install their wireless infrastructure. He/She literally installed an AP in every room (even the janitorial closets). One bathroom had 3 AP's in it. There was an AP about every 10-20 feet in the hallways as well. In one of their buildings that could not have possibly needed more than 15 AP's had 45 of them. I think I may have walked out of there with cancer.

Very appropriate:

deanwebb · December 09, 2015, 09:53:40 AM

High density means no calls dropped! Also, we're enabled for the next-gen wireless of the future!

NetworkGroover · December 09, 2015, 10:13:08 AM

Nerm, what are you? Some amateur? All good network engineers know that if you can't swing down the hall from AP to AP like Tarzan, you're doing it wrong!

dlots · December 09, 2015, 10:40:46 AM

I think I had that guy where I use to work, we had a 1k square foot building... he wanted 30 APs in there. We ended up putting in 1.

He didn't look at the blue-prints scale and thought it was a big building.

Nerm · December 09, 2015, 12:59:05 PM

Quote from: AspiringNetworker on December 09, 2015, 10:13:08 AM
Nerm, what are you? Some amateur? All good network engineers know that if you can't swing down the hall from AP to AP like Tarzan, you're doing it wrong!

That literally made me lol. Good thing I had put my drink down before I read that.

Quote from: dlots on December 09, 2015, 10:40:46 AM
I think I had that guy where I use to work, we had a 1k square foot building... he wanted 30 APs in there. We ended up putting in 1.

He didn't look at the blue-prints scale and thought it was a big building.

Oh dear God. 30 AP's in a 1k sqft building? Wow!

Reggle · December 09, 2015, 02:56:09 PM

I've had to disable APs on one occasion so the remaining ones could finally find a free frequency.
On the other hand, I've known some customers wanting to go full wireless on all desks. That's like +25 people per AP, including voice software and screen sharing. No idea how to solve that one, I'm not experienced enough with wireless.

deanwebb · December 09, 2015, 03:08:37 PM

Quote from: Reggle on December 09, 2015, 02:56:09 PM
I've had to disable APs on one occasion so the remaining ones could finally find a free frequency.
On the other hand, I've known some customers wanting to go full wireless on all desks. That's like +25 people per AP, including voice software and screen sharing. No idea how to solve that one, I'm not experienced enough with wireless.

Let me know how that goes. We're trying to go full ~~retard~~ wireless over the next few years.

mlan · December 09, 2015, 06:34:30 PM

The struggle is real. The OP example is obviously way over-provisioned, but you will see education standards for one AP per classroom (but not the bathrooms and janitorial closet). Wireless usage in edu is such a different beast from your typical enterprise though, and people are scrambling to get enough AP density to support 1-to-1 student devices in addition to BYOD, etc. Add in digital curriculum where you have 30 kids in a classroom all downloading large media files at the same time from a single AP. Now make that classroom mobile and every common area in a school needs to be a flexible learning/collab environment that supports high-density wireless. I can see why people are going overboard without understanding the consequences on available spectrum, as they just think "more AP's" will solve all the problems. That said, an under-provisioned school is a nightmare to support. It's all about the site survey data, proper channel planning, 5GHz, etc.

wintermute000 · December 10, 2015, 04:09:36 AM

True story
One of my colleagues does requirements gathering, uses the vendor's planning tools/spreadsheet and produces an indicative bill of materials for a big office wireless fitout.
Vendor is asked to validate, vendor uses A DIFFERENT (not their own) planning tool, using made up specs at double the density basically, and produces an indicative bill of material for double the price and numbers.
Our engineer is then made to look stupid by having an answer 50% out from the vendor (even though he basically used a baseline of half the requirements... requirements which HE gathered and the vendor just made up). This is a vendor we've done business with for years, and a pre-sales son-of-a-b1tch that we've worked with for years, and they throw us under a bus just to make their quarterly figures.

So yeah, it happens, all the time. And yes they did end up buying double the APs they needed, because the vendor must be right....

also the next time you have some customer asking about headline wireless-AC throughput figures.... run.... (or beat them on the head with your official CWNA textbook and the gazillion blogs pointing out why no you're not getting 1600M from your shiny new AP, not even if its stamped wave two on it)

Been reading the CWNA material lately and its astounding how much I never knew I didn't know (if you get what I mean).

deanwebb · December 10, 2015, 08:24:22 AM

I can vouch for wintermute's story. We've already bought 1 AP for every 3 employees in our Huge International Megacorp. But, since our wireless guy is being careful in his placement of them, I don't think that we're going to use them all. We may just leave some of them deactivated and use them as roofing materials for some third-world housing charity project, I don't know...

I ask openly, are the APs of the future going to be as prolific as the 8-port dLink and Belkin switches of the past?