I think this has been thrown out on the listserv before. The major objections tend to be: a) lack of external antenna connectors b) lack of adjustable output power on some units (this may not apply to the Linksys in question) c) lack of management system for these APs, especially in regards to RF planning and control d) generally a more flaky radio in comparison to enterprise gear, but this is hard to quantify and I'm sure some objections would be raised. e) poor roaming experience: there's no pre-auth key caching as in WPA2, so every roam would require the full 8-way handshake. f) all roaming would be L3 roaming: because each AP NATs the clients (this might be different in the OPENWRT build), every roam would likely require a full DHCP cycle on the client, breaking any applications that require session persistence.
The short of it: I wouldn't recommend it for anything but a school on a shoe-string budget. Especially in a dormitory, where you could have high densities of wireless clients, the mixture of thick/thin walls, lots of APs, and many more clients, will lead to a pretty ugly RF environment with co-channel interference. I was talking to one school that had left their APs on full power output in the dorms to provide full coverage throughout the room. Well, sure, the closet had coverage, but AirMagnet's Laptop Analyzer showed anywhere from 15 to 20 APs at any point in time. Frank -----Original Message----- From: Philippe Hanset [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, August 29, 2006 1:44 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] Linksys APs as enterprise solution All, I'm polling the list about an idea that I would like to test in our dormatories. If anyone has done a similar project out there, would you mind sharing your experience. Our dormatories have one port per pillow (10/100), and no wireless except in a few lobbies. As of today, it is a private wireless jungle since many students are bringing their own APs. 3 solutions seem to emerge: -let the jungle be (security risks) -control the jungle by enforcing compliant configurations for private APs (support nightmare) -provide "free" wireless from the University (cost) A significant portion of the cost of installing a WLAN is the switch port, the circuit installation and the power over ethernet port. Well, one could bypass a bunch of these costs (switch port, circuit, PoE and reduce the AP cost) by deploying Linksys WRT54GL (the key being the built-in switch!) and load an OPENWRT code version which provides VLAN/SSID with 802.1x and even Mesh. We would connect the WRT54GL in the existing port in the room and use a regular AC port in the room for power. If necessary a $5 power strip could be considered! To replace the borrowed port we would allow the student to connect to the 4 ports switch built-in the WRT54GL. Those units would be SNMP monitored, and we could even consider an inexpensive enclosure as well. The savings would be considerable (from $300,000 with an enterprise solution to about $60,000 with a Linksys solution. What could go wrong with this plan. -Shelve life (those units will be in air conditioned bedrooms not overheated drop ceilings) -Theft (at $70 MSRP per unit, even 50 units per year wouldn't be a big deal!) -Reliability (anyone out there has tested this?) -Management (we have our own management solution that can easily take care of any style of AP) -Abuse (disconnection of the AC or Cat5) -Unreliable OPENWRT code -Lack of support (with the savings we could hire a dedicated coder and contribute to the opensource initiative ;-) This sounds somehow too easy. What's the catch? Thank you in advance for your input, (no sales please!) Philippe Hanset University of Tennessee ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
