Wireless Access

Hi,

In one of our sites, we have 10 AP-105's in close proximity to each other i.e. approx 12 feet apart. These are also wallmounted, rather than ceiling, they are also mounted approx 12 feet above the floor. This is a school deployment and the close proximity is due to each AP being in each classroom, if you were to take away each classroom dividing wall, then each AP would be 12 feet apart along the same wall (the walls are quite thin too).

My question is; if some of the APs become air monitors ("Mode Aware Arm" is enabled) does this mean there is too much interference or does it mean there is enough spare capacity to allow these APs to become air monitors? or could it possibly be either? I have noticed that 2 or 3 become air monitors but as I am new to Aruba I am not sure how to check why it is doing this.

Just one more thing if someone would be kind enough to comment; If we don't do physical site surveys or use RFPlan (or VisualRF), would I be correct in assuming that blindly deploying APs on the assumption of 1 AP per classroom, and leaving everything to the controller to sort out is not a good way to do deployments? I know that ARM can make adjustments to compensate for things, but am I right to think that bad AP positioning can make things worse? I ask this as someone else had already deployed the APs and that is the methodology that they used i.e. guesswork.

Hopefully that makes sense

Cheers

Do you have the access points 12 feet apart for capacity?

If Mode Aware changes them to Air monitors, that means that there is enough/too much coverage.

---

@cjoseph wrote:

Do you have the access points 12 feet apart for capacity?

 

If Mode Aware changes them to Air monitors, that means that there is enough/too much coverage.

 

---

Hi,

I don't think it was intentional to have the access points 12 feet apart for capacity, it has ended up this way down to the size of the classrooms. The school only have approx 30 laptops that they use, which makes me think 10 access points is overkill. Yet the reason there is 1 access point per classroom is for performance, doesn't really make sense to me.

Thanks for replying.

Cheers

maguire, 

If you do not have the resources to perform a manual site-survey, an VisualRF plan would help you make predictive placement of the AP based on your coverage and capacity requirements. 

But even with VisualRF, you would not have the information of the current RF environment and various interference sources which is present in site survey documents. 

If after deploying the APs based on guess work, wireless clients complain about performance then you would have to perform a site survey or convert an AP to spectrum analyzer to figure out sources of interference. 

The controller's ARM would adjust the power and channel of the APs taking into account the current RF environment and makes adjustment if the errors are high on a particular channel or if it is able to hear the other APs on the same channel and so on...

Hope that helps ! 

--

HT

---

@hthakker wrote:

maguire, 

 

If you do not have the resources to perform a manual site-survey, an VisualRF plan would help you make predictive placement of the AP based on your coverage and capacity requirements. 

But even with VisualRF, you would not have the information of the current RF environment and various interference sources which is present in site survey documents. 

 

If after deploying the APs based on guess work, wireless clients complain about performance then you would have to perform a site survey or convert an AP to spectrum analyzer to figure out sources of interference. 

The controller's ARM would adjust the power and channel of the APs taking into account the current RF environment and makes adjustment if the errors are high on a particular channel or if it is able to hear the other APs on the same channel and so on...

 

 

---

Hi,

Thanks for the info, yes that does help to clear a few things up!

I will see how it goes next week when I go back to the site.

Cheers