Community Feedback

I work in a hospital and a vendor for some of the equipment the sends telemetry data wirelessly to monitoring stations is wanting to put their own infrastructure in for the equipment and they want us to dedicate 3 channels from the 5GHz band to accommodate them. I have never heard of equipment needing their own dedicated channels when every piece of wireless equipment has the ability to autodetect the least obtrusive channel to use automatically. I am thinking they are being ridiculous and don't want to do it with he thought that if we cater to this vendor, then we will cater to someone else and soon be out of channels for our own equipment. Has anyone ever heard of this practice or am I correct in thinking that this vendor is being crazy?

Hi,

First time I saw this type of requirement. But you can serve this requirement by configuring radio profile in the access point.

It all depends on which 3 channels.  If they are non-DFS channels that should be a hard NO, because they would literally be taking away from your infrastructure.  You should ask them if other customers are doing it this way and ask them to talk to those customers.  You should also ask if there is another more reliable way to deploy this with existing wifi without giving up spectrum, which is very precious in a hospital.

They are "letting" us choose the 3 channels, but they have to be non-DFS channels. I was thinking the same thing. I almost flipped when they told me the requirements. I'm just trying to get backup from the community for the higher ups and was making sure I wasn't just dealing with something that might be common. They say other companies have given them the channels, but I don't know.

Ask them to let you speak to those companies.  That would be a hard no in most circumstances, especially if you have to give up those channels in an entire building...

That's what I thought. Thanks for the feedback!

@cgmcknight - did you end up going with the vendor who asked you to dedicate to them 3 channels .. and then did you dedicate them their 3 channels?  Or did you go w/ someone else?  I'm in the same situation likely with the same vendor and was just wondering what you ended up doing. 

@cjoseph - do you have a good "eli5" or "for dummies" reference I could use to share w/ management why dedicating 3 of our channels are bad especially in a hospital setting? 

Thanks​​​​

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Ben Fiser
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Original Message:
Sent: Jul 13, 2020 11:30 AM
From: Charles McKnight
Subject: Equipment vendor asking for 5GHz channels to be dedicated for their equipment

That's what I thought. Thanks for the feedback!