Wireless Access

I have a new car dealership installation, and the farthest point of the car lot is 360 feet away from the building where the nearest AP is mounted.  If I'm using a long range AP, I'm sure I can shoot the signal 360 feet to the far end of the lot.  However, my engineer is telling me that the issue isn't really whether we can shoot the wifi signal 360 feet, it's whether the tablets (iPad Airs) that the salespeople will be using can shoot their signal back 360 feet to the building to communicate with the AP...

Any comments to help me clear this up in my mind would be appreciated.

What APs are you planning on using outside on the dealership lot? With our AP-175 in previous testing, we can support tablet ranges out to 400m and beyond with clear line of sight, so 360 feet should not be an issue. iPad 2 was tested out to 200m, phones and others out to 400m without issue.

Note, this was testing with AP-175 with ANT-2x2-2005 and ANT-2x2-5005 antennas.

interesting results there for the intel device

@Michael, agreed, though these tests were pretty informal and were of little statistical repetition, most of it was likely due to different MCS rate negotiations for 2x2 rates. The main thing was to show valid performance at some distance with mobile devices. AP-275 testing has shown even better performance for mobile devices, with greater speeds at farther ranges. The takeaway for the OP is so long as they use an outdoor AP (the 275 would be ideal for performance, cost, and installation ease), 360ft should not be an issue for even their mobile devices.

For that application you should probably be using an AP with external antennas.  

Your enginner is likely alluding to the potential problems that can arise from a disparity in Tx power between APs and clients.  Increasing the Tx power of the AP to "boost coverage" would cause problems for low-power mobile devices.  The gain from an antenna, however, applys equally to both transmitting and receiving.