Wireless Access

So our Facilities folks are proposing a wireless lighting control system.  We have some basic tech specs on it, and the wireless it uses is 802.15.4 based, so I'm assuming it's essentially ZigBee.  They have nice pretty charts showing how their band plan is laid out so as to not interferece with a standard 1/6/11 WiFi channel plan, but this would be our first rollout.  Before we dig into testing, has anyone had some real world experience with how well this system might coexist with WiFi?

Okay, so I got my hands on a whitepaper now.  The company is enlighted (http://enlightedinc.com) and they claim their wireless control system is based off of 802.15.4, and never mention ZigBee, so I'm guessing at this point that it isn't actual ZigBee at all.

fsweetser,

Honestly, you are at the mercy of that manufacturer's promises of not causing interference.  They never mention Zigbee, but....  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.15.4

If the device operates in the same spectrum as wifi, at minimum there is the potential for interference, and decreased performance because it does not "understand" or operate by the same rules as wifi.  If they choose to change their protocol for some reason and it negatively affects your wifi, you would be stuck with poor wifi.

Maybe someone can chime in on their experience with these specific devices to provide more perspective.

Yeah, that's about what I figured.  They have some nice pretty charts where they show how their system neatly sits in the gaps between 1-6 and 6-11, and they estimate that a typical large environment will only have about a 0.5% duty cycle.  Hopefully I'll get a chance to get my hands on an eval sample and see if the spectrum analyzer agrees...