Wireless Access

Does anyone have experience is using the AP275 outdoor AP to wireless mesh and simultaneously provide client connectivity? Ideally, the customer wants to provide 802.11b/g/n as well as 802.11a/n and wants to be able to support 802.11ac as well. This is a holiday resort with little or no cabling to the AP's in the middle of the venue, hence the wireless mesh. AP's are to be mounted on lamp posts. I can propose using 802.11a radio for the wireless mesh only and 802.11b radio for client connections only, but the customer wants to provide 802.11a/n and ac further down the road. Can the a radio work well as a wireless mesh point as well as provide client connectivity? Unfortunately I have no diagrams at this time.

Unfortunately, the AP275 does not provide meshing capability at this time.  Aruba has mentioned "End of Year" as when it would be supported.

Meshing and Client access on the same radio is possible, but at the expense of performance.  For more information, please see our Outdoor Mimo VRD here:  http://www.arubanetworks.com/vrd/OPPDeployAppNote/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm

Thanks, Colin. This is a medium-long term project and end of this year may be fine. Do you have any performance impact figures when using the 5GHz radio for mesh and client connectivity simultaneously?

There is a big "it depends".  The more clients that attach to the client side of the mesh, the more the performance degrades.  The more mesh traffic that is passed, the more time cycles it takes away from mesh performance.  That is just speaking in general.  how much it degrades depends on your setup and environment.

I would not serve client traffic on a mesh radio just to sidestep that possibility (my opinion).  If you cannot control the number of clients that will attach to a mesh radio and how far away those clients are, you might just want to avoid it.  There are enough variables that you need to keep in mind on a mesh link.  You should just serve clients on the non-mesh link.

Thanks again!