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Business Need: Wirelss Access Points

D

drkns

n00b
Joined
Jan 12, 2009
Messages
24
We have tried to stray away from putting wireless in our office but senior leadership has told us it's a must to implement before year end. :rolleyes:

Can anyone chime in on any wireless access points they have worked with and how they like them in their corporate environment? We are looking at a few different vendors at the moment (Meraki, Meru, Aruba, Motorola, and of course Cisco) but I would like to get some feed back if possible before I make my final decision. We were told that the budget for this isn't really limited and judging by the size of our building no matter what vendor we choose we should only need 2 or 3 APs to cover the entire building. Also want to note that our network is entirely Juniper, EX2200s, 4600s and SSG520s deployed throughout.

I tried searching to see if there were any existing threads and couldn't find anything. So sorry if this has been covered before.

Thanks ahead of time for any feedback/ideas provided.
 
Ubiquiti? Juniper offer Trapeze, but right now it still seems to be all the old Trapeze stuff with a lick of Juniper paint - we use it and it works well though.
 
We currently have deployed over 100+ Cisco 1131AG's and they are rock solid. We are upgrading next year for full deployment to about 220 1141N's and we expect the same great performance.

Since you only need 2 or 3 just get some autonomous AP's and set them up manually. With fewer than a dozen AP's a wireless controller is kind of a waste of money.
 
We use Meru. Single channel architecture (so no channel planning is necessary), over the air qos, 0 ms roaming. They are the only vendor that literally turns wifi into a switch architecture instead of a hub. Works very well in extreme density scenarios, see their 500 client in a small room demo.

That said, if you are really only looking at 3 APs, Meru is going to be overkill. Talk to them, but dont be suprised at the price for such a small deployment. It will scale really well however.

I haven't found hard evidence yet, but I thought Abilene Christian University uses Meru - they were the ones recently in the news that saw 475k+ unique clients in a single day, without any problems. And that was with 97% of their clients on 2.4.
 
hutchingsp said:
Ubiquiti? Juniper offer Trapeze, but right now it still seems to be all the old Trapeze stuff with a lick of Juniper paint - we use it and it works well though.
Click to expand...

I saw Trapeze and it doesn't seem to be quite where we'd like it to be.

Have you used these APs before? They look like they would perfect for our deployment I am just blown away by the price. I also see that the Ubiquiti AP and interface has a guest portal built in which might keep us from having to purchase the solution we were looking at through Avenda Systems for our guests getting connected.

As for the other suggestions/comments. I appreciate all the feedback. We wouldn't have more than 20-30 concurrent devices attached to the wireless network on a daily basis so the Cisco and Meru do seem like over kill, but who's to say management won't come back and make us scale out to a larger radius.
 
As for talking to the big boys, definitely do. Almost everyone is offering discounts right now.
 
drkns said:
I saw Trapeze and it doesn't seem to be quite where we'd like it to be.

Have you used these APs before? They look like they would perfect for our deployment I am just blown away by the price. I also see that the Ubiquiti AP and interface has a guest portal built in which might keep us from having to purchase the solution we were looking at through Avenda Systems for our guests getting connected.

As for the other suggestions/comments. I appreciate all the feedback. We wouldn't have more than 20-30 concurrent devices attached to the wireless network on a daily basis so the Cisco and Meru do seem like over kill, but who's to say management won't come back and make us scale out to a larger radius.
Click to expand...

Ubiquitu, no. I'm simply going off the pretty much universal positive feedback.

The impression I get is that you could pick up a pack of the Ubiquiti AP's and set them up yourself. That's not likely to be the case with the controller based "enterprise" gear (well of course you can set it up yourself, but YKWIM, they're likely to be much more involved).
 
While not necessarily enterprise "branded", The Unifis are quite good. We are getting ready to test out a 3 pack in a hospital of ours. If we are pleased, we will deploy more to cover the rest of the building.

For ~ 250 bucks, I say give the Unifis a try, if they work awesome, great keep them and use them. If they aren't what you are looking for, resell them or return them or maybe make a "trial deal" with a dealer to let you try them before you buy them. If you don't like them then maybe try a bigger vendor.
 
We just got some Ruckus gear in. Dell also has a solution now based off Ruckus
 
I've used cisco 1252's and they have worked great. Ubiquiti also has some decent gear.
 
Thanks for all the feedback everyone. Ubiquiti seems to be the best bet with our small roll out. So I will give them a shot.
 
I thought I saw Ruckus around, but it looks like you are correct.

Is it good stuff?
 
cyr0n_k0r said:
We currently have deployed over 100+ Cisco 1131AG's and they are rock solid. We are upgrading next year for full deployment to about 220 1141N's and we expect the same great performance.

Since you only need 2 or 3 just get some autonomous AP's and set them up manually. With fewer than a dozen AP's a wireless controller is kind of a waste of money.
Click to expand...

I agree. Just manually configure 3 APs in stand-alone mode. You don't need a controller or central management for 3 access points.

hey cyr0n_k0r, I manage a huge Cisco wireless network as well currently 160+ APs. Some 1131s, 1141s, and 3500s. Maybe you could share some ideas. We have a WCS, and 4 Controllers at the moment.
 
Shottah_king said:
I agree. Just manually configure 3 APs in stand-alone mode. You don't need a controller or central management for 3 access points.

hey cyr0n_k0r, I manage a huge Cisco wireless network as well currently 160+ APs. Some 1131s, 1141s, and 3500s. Maybe you could share some ideas. We have a WCS, and 4 Controllers at the moment.
Click to expand...
Man I wish I had WCS right now. We're getting it hopefully in about 6 months when we migrate over to the 1141's.
Right now we have a single 5508 with a 125 license but I'm concerned with our mem usage. Our AP count is half what the controller can support (according to cisco) but we run at like 70% mem usage.

When we upgrade we are moving to a 50/50 approach with another 5508 controller so hopefully we can see our mem usage go down.

Because we run AP's at multiple sites but only have 1 controller we run everything in HREAP so perhaps that adds a lot of overhead that other environments might not have. Not sure.
 
cyr0n_k0r said:
Man I wish I had WCS right now. We're getting it hopefully in about 6 months when we migrate over to the 1141's.
Right now we have a single 5508 with a 125 license but I'm concerned with our mem usage. Our AP count is half what the controller can support (according to cisco) but we run at like 70% mem usage.

When we upgrade we are moving to a 50/50 approach with another 5508 controller so hopefully we can see our mem usage go down.

Because we run AP's at multiple sites but only have 1 controller we run everything in HREAP so perhaps that adds a lot of overhead that other environments might not have. Not sure.
Click to expand...

For the thread creator. To make things easy. You can get poe access points run cat5e or cat6 from a poe switch. That way you don't have to worry about finding power in the ceiling.

The WCS does make it a bit easier. You can create maps that show RF prediction and it's easier to troubleshoot. The other added feature is location based services. Once you have your maps you can track wireless clients which is really neat. We are looking into getting a MSE but not sure yet.

We have 2 5508s at our main campus with 150 access points a 150 license on each controller for redundancy. We have one 5508 at a remote site which supports 120+users and 11 access points. And a 4402 at another remote location with 3 access points.

At the main campus, we have most of the APs on one controller this way the controller doesn't have to exchange messages with the other controller when clients roam between APs on separate controllers.

I just checked the WCS. All 3 of our 5508s are running at 53% memory utilization.
 
SpaceHonkey said:
Not threadjacking here, but I wanted to point out that 160 APs is not really a huge network. There are several universities out there that run 2500+ APs.
Click to expand...

So out of the whole conversation you nitpick my wording? I live in small country where we don't even have a university. I work for the second largest employer here, so huge was the correct wording. I understand in the US you have major cities and major universities. I was hoping you was going to give to the conversation not nitpick the wording.

But anyways thanks for enlightening me.
 
cyr0n_k0r said:
Since you only need 2 or 3 just get some autonomous AP's and set them up manually. With fewer than a dozen AP's a wireless controller is kind of a waste of money.
Click to expand...

If you need seemless roaming for VoIP or other real-time applications then this might be the only option. Otherwise with e.g. WPA2-Enterprise you might see upwards of 5 seconds delay when roaming between access points.
 
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