Quote:
You definitely need help from some of the professionals here, but I
can comment that yes, it does seem best to plan on distributing your
signal via ethernet cable to various points in the buildings, and then
attaching APs there.
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seaweedsteve: That's what I said when I was asked. But somehow that have it in their minds that a shortcut is feasible. I firmly believe that shortcuts will cost them in performance and IT support. Regardless, they want to know how they will save if they go the consumer route instead of the industrial/commercial route.
Here is my logic behind the dual-radio. The school just installed brand new iMacs for the teachers that have the intel 802.11n wireless chip. These are the only computers that connect to the server and require a higher bandwidth. I figured with dual-radio APs we could set one radio to 5ghz for the iMacs and the other radio to 2.4ghz mixed (b, g, n) for any guests systems that may require connections.
Does this make sense? Would this setup help with the interference problem or is it not with the extra cash for the dual-radio capable APs?
Quote:
Theoretically, I understand that you can get functional roaming by
giving all APs the same SSID and security key, but varying channels in
overlapping areas. Don't know for sure how it tends to work in
practice.
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Originally the school was quoted for a Colubris and they found it to be too expensive. I did some investigation and found out that this was what they recommended to do in their quote. There are already ethernet lines run throughout the school that can be used and I understand the whole setup with same SSID and security key but different channels.
I also found out that in order to run POE they would have to upgrade the main switch which was in addition to already high quote for the Colubris system. I did some research and the only dual-radio AP that can run on POE is the Cisco Aironet 1250 but it requires a Cisco Switch but this school deals with Nortel switches and the 470 is the one that they would need for POE which is not compatible with the Aironet 1250. So basically if they were to go with POE they would be forced to use single-radio APs.
So this is the big crossroad that I have to present to school:
POE or Dual-radio or neither. Will dual-radio circumvent the microwave problem (2 microwaves per classroom that are used constantly thus jamming the 2.4ghz band)? If not then the option is clearly POE or no POE. Anyone have an opinion on this. If it were not for the fact that the teacher computers need to access the server for files and log-ons then this would not be a problem.