Controllerless Networks

Hello, all!

I am the IT guy for a school system in a mission school outside the US. For various reasons (including donations specifically for this), we are looking at the possibility of getting an iClassroom.

The company that sells the package is including a couple of Aruba Instant 105 APs.

Since we are a low-budget mission school, and we need to come up with a sizable chunk of the cost of the iClassroom setup, we are looking at what is included to see if we can cut the costs down a bit by selecting different hardware.

I looked up the cost of this AP, and it appears to be a whopping $625.

When the system is in-place, there should not be more than probably 25 to 30 devices needing wireless access. In the future if the idea takes off, I could see 150-160 devices, but not for now. If they're able to handle a huge number of devices, future-proofing may be enough reason to go with these.

I looked it up, and the access points are made for high-density environments. How many devices can one of these APs effectively handle without speed degradation? Are there any other special features (aside from the peer-to-peer controller system)?

So basically, I am trying to determine whether this AP is overkill for our needs. If it is, what would the recommended alternative be?

Thanks!
ElectroPulse

Density will always depend on the bandwidth you need for each device. I would certainly consider or discuss with the company, the IAP-205 or IAP-215 as these are the newer AC access points for low and mid density and they hold the same 695 and 895 list prices as the respective N access points (105, 115). Both the N and AC versions can certainly handle 30-40 users with average bandwidth without an issue.

Hi, 

As a low-cost classroom AP you can consider IAP103 - it is almost a half of IAP105 or IAP205. IAP-103 is a great device so I can recommend it for you to fulfill your requirements. You can easily extend your instant network to reasonable number of IAPs to handle mentioned 150 users. Please bear in mind that in WLAN you have shared medium. So for singe, dual-radio AP it would be 20MHz channel for 2.4GHz band and 40MHz channel for 5GHz band in common deployment. so you can deliver at least 150-200Mbps unidirectional traffic to your WLAN clients when they can be distributed across the bands (WLAN adapters are dual-band). 

HTH,

Marek 

Another point to consider is the internal antennas utilised in each of the access points.  The internal omni-directional antennas in the AP-105 have a much greater downtilt to the omni-directional antennas in the AP-103.  What this means is that the AP-105 propagates signal further downward and less horizontally in comparison to the AP-103.  If you are mounting the access point at height or you have a high density deployment this is great but if you are mounting the access point in a single level building and what greater horizontal coverage you will find the AP-103 has a greater signal propagation area than the AP-105.