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Wireless Coverage

ismail884
Level 1
Level 1

Hi,

I need some information about Wireless deployement in a huge surface.I want to cover a surface of 40 ha that contains about 400 appartements and Villas.

Is there a solution to do that with a few number of Access Points?

Thanks

27 Replies 27

Hi,

I thinks that the best solution that I can propose is to deploy Ethernet cabling inside each building and deploy Wifi outside to cover gardens and outside surface.

thanks for all

Ismail

If you only need to cover two apartments, 2 to 4 computers sharing a Wireless access point will work fine. I don't understand why you would disagree with this especially when the connection to the internet is probably not more than 10Mb/s.

The project is for a hotel that has a surface of Ha of Appartements and Villas for rents, So they need to provide Internet Access to clients every where they move in their Appartements, Villas,Gardens,Piscine.for outside we can cover an important surface since there are few obstacles, but inside buildings it's so difficult to cover more that appartement with an access point.

I think that if you place your antennas correctly, you will be able to cover at least two apartments with one access point with no problems. This fixes the issue with having to use one access point per apartment.

another possible solution would be xirrus arrays. google xirrus.

Xirrus has a nice story, but the reality falls short of the marketing. You could put enough gain on an antenna to boil water, but once you hit the inpenatrable object the game is over. Their products probably make more sense in places that you have to cover a lot of users in a small area, like a large cube farm, and you want to reduce the number of network drops.

It is still worth looking into. The Xirrus guys I dealt with provided a free survey based off their device of course, and let us test 2 arrays . That was a year ago. We haven't had a complaint since. Building is 15 to 20,000 sqft made of brick and concrete and mostly offices.

I am interested to learn morefrom an actual Xirrus end user than their marketing info. From an RF science standpoint I don't think their arrays can support any more users than Vivato and Vivato was limited to 50 concurrent users. Is this what you are seeing or is your number of users less so you just never notice the limitation? I would be interested in learning just how they eliminate the co-channel and adjacent channel interference as well as scalability issues. Again, no marketing info please. I would like first hand user data from you. What data rates connected at, ranges, attenuation info, etc.

From the Xirrus website it seems that they are stressing 5 Ghz, which makes sense for a lot of reasons. I've been telling my customers the same things for years. But the reality is that in most deployments you do not have a lot of control on the client end. In hospitals you have to support 2.4 GHz wifi badges, in manufacturing you end up supporting 2.4 Ghz WiFi scanners, and in education you have to support every piece of WiFi equipment since the inception of WiFi. It is great that the Cisco 7921 supports 5 Ghz as voice was always a pain in the past, and now is much easier.

It looks like the Xirrus uses multiple radios with sectorized antennas. You could have a setup with very good results in the 5 Ghz band with that configuration. The problem in the 2.4 band is that even if the antennas on the access points had zero channel overlap, the clients have omni directional antennas. So the clients would be the cause of the same channel interference. Rememmber, each client radio is essentially the same as the access point radio, and you have little to no control over that device in most deployments. Sectorizing the antennas make a lot of sense in a very large open areas, but most buildings tend not to be that large or open. In this case that is certainly true. Now if they only have three 2.4 Ghz radios the problem with the same channel interference goes down.

CCX is one way to bring a level of control to the WiFi network clients, but that requires CCX client software. When using Cisco, Atheros (same as Cisco), Intel, etc, CCX capable device you have to use the manufacturers' supplicant to get CCX on the clients. The problem in an a lot of deployments is the CCX client limits the client side experience (Group Policy, Login Scripts, etc.) So without CCX the clients are out there blasting away with something between 2 and 4 DBI gain on something between 30 and 100 mw. Again, these are omnis (still waiting to see a laptop with a rotating parabolic dish!), so you are pushing out decent amount of signal a good distance with these clients, potentially into the area of another access point or clients on the same channel.

This is why when designing a WiFi network you need to look at the application(s) first, the clients second, then look at the access point and antennas as a way to provide the necessary performance for the applications to behave and the clients to have a good experience. Hopefull the advent of the 802.11n will make this easier as we will have many more channels to work with. But until we get to the point that a decent number of clients are .N we have to deal with the issues of the 2.4 Ghz spectrum.

It seems like this deployment is for apartments. It may be possible to deploy wireless outside the units in open areas (maybe the mesh access points) and get coverage in the units. RTS/CTS would need to be enabled, but if you only had to support web access that may work. The issue would be how far inside the buildings you would penetrate. But from the sounds of the limited survey that was performed it may not give the desired results.

If the goal is to provide internet access to the units they may want to provide internet with an ethernet handoff (ethernet, LRE, DSL), and let the renters/purchasers of the units deploy their own WiFi if they choose to. That or offer it to those that would like managed WiFi the ability to purchase it for a fee.

You make all of my points exactly. I am wanting to hear the results from an actual Xirrus customer. I am a strong believer that Vivato, Xirrus, and others are simply playing on the lack of knowledge that abounds about wifi, its limitations, and its good points. As I sit on the IEEE standards association and have had constant input on the standard, I fully believe that 802.11n in 5ghz will be the way to go. I just wish these start-up companies would quit preying on folks who have not gotten a lot of education on how to shop for a enterprise grade wifi solution. As for the level of control you speak of when dealing with clients may I point you to 802.11k and 802.11r. K has more to do with client information and R is standardizing roaming feature sets.

No doubt. Client control has always been a weakness in WiFi. It was a bunch easier for us a few years ago when we would sell the customer the access points and the PC Cards to use with the network. I'm glad that finally we are getting to the point that I can start dropping support for plain old 11B!

Having used Vivato panels in the past, and seeing the results of a "shotgun" approach to coverage, I totally agree with Dennis.

I have also seen the xirrus solution up close and had a chance to inspect the innards of one and was not impressed.

Here is something else to consider with "big box" solutions: if you lose the device and/or power to it, you lose a lot of coverage, whereas a high density cell design will compensate for the loss of an AP or two.

Y'all are striping the primary & secondary controllers to adjacent APs I hope!

Ooh, ooh,, almost forgot....

Xirrus prints some very nice and informative tech posters http://www.xirrus.com/posters/

have to keep the thread going......

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