how close is too close

[Shawn Purdy]

had a user who decided to install two AP's in a conference room. This per se is not a problem except the room is less than 3000 square feet. The AP's were spaced on 15 feet apart. I'm concerned that this will cause more harm than good. The reason behind was because they wanted to ensure that if a large crowd was in this conference room they would all have coverage. Due to size of the room I disagree. Installed were two 1142 AP's. I would have opted for one 3600 model or even just one 1142 i havent tested the 3600 yet but plan to later this year. What do you guys think?

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[blakekrone]

I've seen in the Cisco design guides the number 28' being tossed around. I believe this was in the location design guide so it could be more important when talking RTLS services, but generally speaking I never place APs closer than 25'.

Now with that said there are a lot of other things that come into play here. Is RRM handling channels and power? If yes then it's more important to have things properly spaced. If you are not using RRM then you could possibly tweak things with manual channels and power levels to get the cell sizes right after performing multiple site surveys with each configuration change.

[Shawn Purdy]

yes rrm is handling the power. I agree I would have never designed it that way. 30ft is generally my rule of dumb or depending on the minimum coverage I'm trying to create.

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[Scott Fella]

I have seen installs that has AP's that's close... If you don't manually set the TX power level, then it will probably set those or one of them to a power level 8. Then you will see no users on that AP. I have also seem RRM do this when AP's were 30' apart, so you need to verify what RRM sets these power levels to. You should also look at setting your max and minimum TX thresholds which do help a lot.

Thanks,

Scott Fella

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[George Stefanick]

I have seen and in fact Ive installed aps within 20 feet to load balance clients in conference rooms as well. If you have 50+ people on devices and you need to load balance the traffic it works well. As Scott points out RRM and Thersholds are important.

Dont get caught up with what the config guides state.

If you expect high desnisty and users using video, voice and high bandwidth, you need to deisgn a soltion that works.

Just make sure they arent on the same channel!