Campus Wide Wifi

Wed Jul 17 21:24:45 EDT 2013

Oops sent this out wrong earlier.

We are looking to a system wide upgrade from G to AC as well.  There are a few new generation of cloud controlled WiFi vendors. It makes management and security much easier than traditional enterprise equipment.

These APs can isolate clients to individual networks, cap average bandwidth, provide layer 7 firewall features to block specific applications (hello BitTorrent), among other things we are taking into consideration. You can do this without knowing IOS ACLs and configuration is all done via a web interface.

You will also want to increase AP density to scale out as wifi devices will begin to proliferate. APs tend to support up to 30 and some claim 50 devices max. Users these days have maybe 2 to 3 devices and we are starting to provide staff iPads or ultra books adding to device counts.

Prices for enterprise APs from any vendors seem to be around $600 to $1000 (1x1 to 3x3 configs) with anywhere between 20% to 40% off depending on your purchasing agreements, depending on how well you can haggle, or how many people will bid on your RFP. Service contracts are separate as well.

Some vendors we are starting to look at:
Meraki (owned by Cisco now, might be easier to procure as most govt agencies have existing Cisco contracts, probably the most feature rich)
Aerohive (similar in functionality to Meraki, provides ILS integration if desired, have a lot of library contract wins in my area)
Meru (similar to above, haven't looked too deep here yet)
Ubiquiti (similar to above, much cheaper list prices, haven't looked too deep here yet either)

If you don't have a huge budget look atopen-mesh.com<http://open-mesh.com/> as they are about 15% the cost to purchase of others.  They are run by the guy who helped write some of the original Meraki software when they were more open source than corporate. Only problem they are nowhere as feature rich.

Good luck on your upgrade!

Sent from my iPad

On Jul 17, 2013, at 4:13 PM, "R Talbert" <retalbert at ymail.com<mailto:retalbert at ymail.com>> wrote:

Afternoon All:

802.11ac is 5Ghz only. 5GHz signals have a shorter range and lower penetration ability than 2.5Ghz signals.
Many 802.11ac devices have multiple antennas and dual transmitters to be backward compatible with 2.5Ghz; 802.11n, 802.11g, and 802.11b clients.
I have seen that 802.11n devices can 'hang on' to week signals much better than 802.11g or 802.11b, so we can hope these new multi-band devices (802.11ac) will help those with older hardware to stay connected.

Robert Talbert
MLS, BIT
State of Nevada
________________________________
From: Thomas Edelblute <TEdelblute at ANAHEIM.NET<mailto:TEdelblute at ANAHEIM.NET>>
To: WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU<mailto:WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2013 3:18 PM
Subject: Re: [WEB4LIB] Campus Wide Wifi

We have some 802.11ac hardware on order and we hope that it will have greater distance than 802.11g and 802.11n hardware we currently use.

Thomas Edelblute
Public Access Systems Coordinator
Anaheim Public Library

From: Web technologies in libraries [mailto:WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Trista Smith
Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2013 1:07 PM
To: WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU<mailto:WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU>
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Campus Wide Wifi

Good afternoon,

Our library has been limping by with a pretty standard router for our wireless. We use a sonicwall to route our cable internet through (30 mbps download) and then a Belkin router and a repeater on the back end of the library. We have  pretty small building, but there is a park on the side of our building. We would like to provide wifi for our building and the park. Currently, the signal reaches the park but is very weak and our wireless is slow and usually overloaded.

Does anyone have a configuration of hardware/software that allows their wireless to cover a significant area (like a city block) and allows for many users without compromising bandwidth? I've done some research and there seems to be a lot of ways to go about this, but I'd love to hear about solutions that have worked well.

Thanks!
Trista Smith
Director
Bitterroot Public Library
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