Wireless Access

We have approx 500 AP-125s and AP-105s, about 50 of which are in a 12-story residence hall on campus. Since this is tallest building in the area, there are quite a few cell antennas as well as some APs from a commercial wifi ISP. Said ISP contacted us this morning reporting a lot of (customer affecting) interference from our equipment on the 5.8GHz band they use. We temporarily disabled the a radios in the building, and this resolved the issue for the ISP.

 

What options are available for some sort of shielding between the ISP's APs and our Aruba APs? Of course, it would be cost-prohibitive to cover the roof in copper, but would individual copper pans pans placed either above our APs, or below the ISP's APs gain us anything (think of something like the metal disks that keep squirrels off of bird feeders)?

 

What else should we be thinking about? Thanks!

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@ajs wrote:

We have approx 500 AP-125s and AP-105s, about 50 of which are in a 12-story residence hall on campus. Since this is tallest building in the area, there are quite a few cell antennas as well as some APs from a commercial wifi ISP. Said ISP contacted us this morning reporting a lot of (customer affecting) interference from our equipment on the 5.8GHz band they use. We temporarily disabled the a radios in the building, and this resolved the issue for the ISP.

 

What options are available for some sort of shielding between the ISP's APs and our Aruba APs? Of course, it would be cost-prohibitive to cover the roof in copper, but would individual copper pans pans placed either above our APs, or below the ISP's APs gain us anything (think of something like the metal disks that keep squirrels off of bird feeders)?

 

What else should we be thinking about? Thanks!

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Could you turn down the power on the AP's causing the interference?   

Turn your AP into a spectrum monitor and see where your channels overlap. Come to an agreement of who gets what channels.

 

Try some on the top floor an go down, see where you need to set up your new profiles to give away 5 gig.

All Aruba APs in default mode should be able to let you know which channels the WIFI provider is using at a glance.

 

This information is aggregated on the controller's security dashboard under interfering networks .     Look for the column that says:  Channel.

 

Good call on the coordination approach, there are plenty of 5 GHz channels available.

I would agree with Keith on this, they are always going to interfere unless you and the SP agree to keep everyone seperate. You'll likely also get interference where their signal can be heard on other floors of your building. Not knowing why you are using an outdoor wi-fi vendor, your other option of course is to deploy AP-175s outside yourself and replace the ISP for outdoor coverage. 

 

-awl

Thanks for the replies. I have been working with the wisp to identify which channels they are using and we should be able to iron things out. The wisp also suggested not using 40MHz channels, and perhaps even dropping down to 10MHz channels. If we did this, would we be losing anything other than a bit of bandwidth from our clients perspective? @Andy. We are interfering with a commercial wisp that provides Internet access to the surrounding (rural) community, not on our campus.

Tony,

 

Completely understand. You can go down to 20 MHz channels which will free up more channels, but at the end of the day it's up to you to decide what's best for your network and how well you want to play with this other service vendor. Your clients will lose speed by lowering the system to 20 MHz channels. The only tools I've seen doing 10 MHz channels are long range Wi-Fi systems. You aren't doing anything wrong by operating the way you are today, this is just the nature of unlicensed band networking.

 

-awl

Back...

 

I have the channels the wireless ISP uses (and they use Ubiquiti's channel shifting which puts them 5MHz off). What is the easiest way to limit an AP group to a specific *set* of channels?

 

ajs

you would find it in the regulatory domain profile....> Allowed channels.

 

So I would create a new regulatory domain profile with just the channels I want and then apply it to the AP group?