Wireless Access

We have a small campus with wireless inside buildings, and we would like to add outside wireless to the grid.

Campus topography is basically a bowl shape. At the bottom and center of campus is a tall building that has a 15' high antenna tower on top, which is idle. You can see this antenna from basically everywhere on campus.

Order-of-magnitude, the furthest distance is about 1,000 feet. Campus community is M/L 1000 people. Probably the largest usage would be during a football game, and the football stadium is next to the building with the antenna.

We have about 440 APs inside the various and sundry buildings, and are running AOS 8.3 because 135 of the APs are AP-103H models. We could probably shift some equipment around and make a few purchases to retire the 103s if there was an appropriate good reason, but we have 213 AP-135s and AP-105s  and so AOS 8.6 is for all practical purposes as high as we can go operating system wise. 

There is definitely significant leakage of signal out of the buildings. (Enough leakage that many students believe that we have an outdoor network and that it's crappy :-) )

So if you were designing this network, what would you use?

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Cathy Fasano
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I would use a competent Aruba partner so that they can give you some good options customized to your specific circumstances.  There are so many different possibilities that someone who knows outdoor and someone you knows your infrastructure is the best fit, in this case.

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Any opinions expressed here are solely my own and not necessarily that of Hewlett Packard Enterprise or Aruba Networks.
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Original Message:
Sent: Jul 12, 2021 06:45 PM
From: Cathy Fasano
Subject: Engineering an outdoor wireless network

We have a small campus with wireless inside buildings, and we would like to add outside wireless to the grid.

Campus topography is basically a bowl shape. At the bottom and center of campus is a tall building that has a 15' high antenna tower on top, which is idle. You can see this antenna from basically everywhere on campus.

Order-of-magnitude, the furthest distance is about 1,000 feet. Campus community is M/L 1000 people. Probably the largest usage would be during a football game, and the football stadium is next to the building with the antenna.

We have about 440 APs inside the various and sundry buildings, and are running AOS 8.3 because 135 of the APs are AP-103H models. We could probably shift some equipment around and make a few purchases to retire the 103s if there was an appropriate good reason, but we have 213 AP-135s and AP-105s  and so AOS 8.6 is for all practical purposes as high as we can go operating system wise. 

There is definitely significant leakage of signal out of the buildings. (Enough leakage that many students believe that we have an outdoor network and that it's crappy :-) )

So if you were designing this network, what would you use?

------------------------------
Cathy Fasano
------------------------------