Wireless Access

Hi,

I am kinda learning and firefighting wireless at the same time at the minute, so I hope you can bear with me if you read below!

To give some background to my question; For some reason (noone in our office knows why), our deployments of the AP-105 (in a school environment) have been done under the assumption that the AP can only support 15 clients, and one AP has been put into each class regardless of the size of the room. Our team leader is thinking of putting 2 AP-105's in each classroom (for future deployments) to support more laptops connecting, but I am not so sure that this is a good idea. The APs would likely be 10 feet away from each other (in the same room), and there is no guarantee that all the devices connecting will be 802.11n capable. As I am now slowly picking up the mess that some of the previous installations appear to have been, and I would like to follow "Best Practices", I had a few question to ask. Unfortunately, I am asking them here rather than trying to read the guides at the moment, as I need to try and get some answers quickly before things get deployed regardless, and then I end up having to sort out the mess later on.

Thanks if you have read this far!

My questions

Does anybody know how many clients the AP-105 can support connecting at the same time? I know this might depend on the type of traffic, the wireless radio etc, but is there a rough guide to sizing an AP?

Is there a minimum amount of distance that should be between two AP-105's?

If anyone has any advice that would be appreciated, I know these things could be hard to predict without the details of our sites.

Cheers

p.s. I have found out that all of our site surveys have been "guess work", noone has ever used RF Plan, I think the early surveys someone USED to walk around with a laptop and an AP connected via a long cat5e lead, to test suitability of AP placement (no spectrum analyzer). Site surveys no longer get done at all, and the assumption is one AP-105 per class, regardless of wall thickness, room size etc. Hence my post, especially now they are considering two APs per class!

Hello

 By default APs are configured to support 64 clients per radio, you can change the value on the controller. Our test show with n capable clients yours can go as far as 50 clients streamming youtube (yours have to tweak ARM profiles and QoS), and as much as 60 clients in mixed envoirment. For example right now in our offices I have 25 clients connected to one AP105 (I use the band steering feature) in mixed envoirment. (g,a and n capable devices).

 For the deployment the radio it's not only the one matter you have to take account also the speed and number of clients. For example orur only wireless offices have APs that covers the same location using RF Load Balance feature to increase speed.

 I see that 10 feet it's a really short distance if  you make that install and enble mode aware arm i will place a bet that the second AP will become a Air Monitor.

  We have deployed more than 1.5 K units of AP in school envoirment and we are usin one AP per clasroom with 25+- 30  wireless clients per classrom (we are usin APs 125)

Hope this helps

Hi,

Thanks for the reply, any help is much appreciated.

I have people on one side going ahead and doing stuff without them giving a second thought to what they are doing because they are basing things on guess work, and on the other side people who blindly install this stuff anyway without questioning it. I am in the middle of this and trying to get the facts before anything else gets done. As I am new to Aruba, I am trying to read the guides as fast as I can, whilst trying to keep everyone else at arms length in the meantime, but also trying to give fact to guess work.

With regards to the AP client ratios that is interesting to know, and at least I have something to go on for the time being. I would imagine that our deployments don't have band steering or other such features enabled at the moment, as everything is likely to be default settings. I have seen them mentioned in the some of the VRF fundamental guides though, and I will look into them.

Also, things like the APs being so close together, I know that we already have this in some deployments. Some classrooms have wooden sliding doors as dividers between them, but there is still an AP in both classes, the APs are approx 10ft apart and both are situated on the wall in each class, rather than ceiling.

Thanks again for the info.

Cheers