compare Access point coverage in North america and Europe

[ismailsh12]

Will the coverage of an access point say AP 1020 with ANT 3213 in North America be the same as in Germany considering the transmitter power in North America can be set to 100mW max and 50mW in Europe max ?

[sbilgi]

There would not be any difference between the area of coverage and coverage depends on the place the Access point is mounted. For safer purpose Do not mount the access point on building perimeter walls unless outside coverage is desired.

[ethiel]

Yes, running an AP at 50mw will give you a smaller coverage area than an AP at 100mw. So if you run the NA AP at 50mw, your coverage should look the same. Running each at full power, you will have a slightly smaller cell with 50mw than 100mw. It is not linear, but it is very dependant on the environment. So outdoor, I would expect the coverage cell to be 2/3 or 3/4 the size (that is only a guess), but indoor locations could make that difference smaller or larger depending on the walls.

Sorry if this is not very specific, but because of the nature of RF and building composition, the only sure way to know is to try it and see what your results are.

-Eric

[scottmac]

It is likely that the practical coverage will be less than half of the area, given common environmental concerns, cabling, frequency, throughput, and antennas.

Since you are already starting with ~half the power. Your signal/noise ratio becomes more critical the lower the signal level and, basically, it takes less noise to interfere.

Think of it like this:

If you have a signal range of (these are arbitrary numbers) zero to ten. Of that range, you have a noise floor of three (30%).

If you now reduce that range so it's now zero to five, and the noise floor remains the same (three), your noise floor is now 3/5 (60%) of your available range ...

Once the signal begins to degrade, due to distance (for example), you only have the remaining 40% to operate in to get any kind of connection at all, versus the 70% of your operating range provided by the stronger signal.

If you were operating these devices in an otherwise RF-free area, then yeah, maybe you'd get ~50% coverage ... in the real world, given the usual environment, I believe you'll see that it's actually much less.

Good Luck

Scott