Wireless Access

Hi,

I am desiging a mesh network using AP365 for outdoor mesh portals and mesh points. The area has lots of trees, the AP's will be placed to have LOS.

What approximate distance can be supported between the APs?

In addition, the outdoor AP's will have to provide connectivity to indoor AP's, which will be AP 207 models. The houses are brick houses. How well does the signal from the AP 365 penetrate through walls?

I look forward to your advice.

Thanks.

What operating system (ArubaOS with controllers, or Instant-based)? How many portals and how many points, and what will the overall topology look like (building a map in Google Earth is most effective)?

Distances with clear line of sight, I would put the max at 250-300m personally but I've tested out to 500m without much issue, but it all depends on how it's used and what traffic they are carrying. 

Are you planning on doing client access on the 5Ghz radios with mesh or no? I would recommend NOT to...

As far as RF through walls, it just depends on the walls. You can find plenty of articles on line with different attenuation values but it's best to actually measure your walls for attenuation. You will likely not be able to guarantee indoor coverage from outdoor APs, in my experience, it will always be best effort, even for mesh from indoor APs to outdoor APs.

Hi Jerrod,

Thank you for your quirck response, that is much appreciated.

The network will use a controller, planning to use 7205. Unfortunately I cannot share a map.

The ratio is roughly 1 mesh portal to 4 mesh points and the aim is to have a maximum of 2 hops.

Clients will only use 2.4 GHz.

Thanks for your advice on the outdoor to indoor coverage. I believe a survey will need to validate the design but I am looking at starting point for a first proposal.

Thanks

So then you'll be fine. We recommend that based on topology, you create AP groups for each portal and all the points you want it to connect to (as opposed to one large group) so that you have some control over the topology.

Thanks again Jerrod.

One thing I have been considering is running a cable from the AP365 outdoors to the AP207 indoors. Is that possible? There is only port available but that should be usable. Or would I need a switch?

Thanks

With ArubaOS that is possible, just verify L2 on the 365's port with a laptop to ensure that DHCP works, and that it's handing out proper Option43/60. If you carry trunked VLANs for a switch, you will need 8.4.0.3 or 8.5.0.1 (8.3 is fine, there's a bug in trunked VLANs over mesh). But for a 207 powered by an injector wired to the 365 mesh point, that should work fine on any code version, since it's just a native vlan/access port, I would just make sure it's the same L2 as the 365, otherwise you need to do some additional steps in the system profile.