Wireless Access

Hello,

My customer wants to provide an wifi coverage for a certain part of its building without using cables and wants to use AirMesh with redundancy. My questions is it better to have the portal AP installed on the wall and the point AP installed on the roof ? Can I use the 5GHz mode for the link and the 2.5GHz for data transmission ?.

Can someone provide me idea on basic configuration or design testing or approximate distance between the Portal and Point in mesh link.

Mesh has the same principles as mesh outside, but your range most likely is shorter due to possible interference and multipath.

Are you trying to establish a mesh connection through a wall?

Something like that, we will use AP 105, we will try to make the AP to be infront of the door , and there will not be 100% Line of Sight between the two APs. 

Performance will degrade considerably if Mesh does not have line of sight.  It is even worse indoors due to multipath and interference.  I would not do it.

I have mesh APs deployed doing just this and it works fine. There's no LOS between some of the portals and points, however the concerns about link integrity are totally valid.

My view would be that if it's not expensive to try it, and not embarressing if it doesn't work, why not try it and see?

As long as the mesh link quality shows up as 30 or more, you should be fine. That's as long as the mesh point only needs to serve small densities of lightweight data clients?

In my example, I dedicate the 5ghz of the portals and points to the mesh link, and provide all client services only on the 2.4ghz band. This helps keep the mesh link stable.

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@The.racking.monkey wrote:

I have mesh APs deployed doing just this and it works fine. There's no LOS between some of the portals and points, however the concerns about link integrity are totally valid.

 

My view would be that if it's not expensive to try it, and not embarressing if it doesn't work, why not try it and see?

 

As long as the mesh link quality shows up as 30 or more, you should be fine. That's as long as the mesh point only needs to serve small densities of lightweight data clients?

 

In my example, I dedicate the 5ghz of the portals and points to the mesh link, and provide all client services only on the 2.4ghz band. This helps keep the mesh link stable.

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I fully agree with your approach, as long as you are realistic about the bandwidth, signal strength, signal quality and possible disruption if any of those factors are out of specification.

Why I said I would not try it is that wireless always starts out as something that is not used a great deal and then when everyone discovers it is available, they use it a great deal.  It never seems to go down, and as a shared medium, performance will suffer more greatly on a mesh link that in regular wifi.

Your mileage may vary.

Totally agree.

I find even if you try to control the customer's understanding of the "explosive growth" phenomena (in terms of client count considering BYOD), they still get over excited and end up saturated.

Abi, I guess it's your call based on what you think the client skill and business culture is like?

Also, in this case if the customer has a corporate and guest service, consider only enabling the corporate service on the mesh points? Your justification here is that also offering guest services on them diminishes the chances of a good stable corporate service?

Also keep in mind that you will always be bound to the capacity of the uplink/downlink channel. 

Let say you have one portal and 3 points communicating in 5GHz on channel 36.

Each point also has a client ssid on 2.4GHz on either channel 1,6, or 11. 

Each point has 5 clients.

All the uplink and downlink data has to travel eventually over that single 36 channel. All data is traveling within one 5GHz cell. Not only is all the bandwidth of the channel shared between every device, it is also restricted to the signal quality and data link between each portal and point. Just because your client has a data link of 300 mbs with the Access point does not mean anything when the data link between the access point and the portal in 72 mbs.

You might get away with it but my moto is "when possible ... run cable." haha.