Scott,
We rolled out a WLAN deployment a little over a year ago. We had
first wrestled with the idea of thick APs with either proprietary or
universal management, or thin APs with centralized proprietary
management. We decided on the later route. We then evaluated two main
manufactures - Aruba, and Bluesocket. Cisco wasn't an option as we had
a bad experience with them in the past.
During our evaluation, we looked at many things such as ease of
management, deployment topology, user-friendly naming conventions,
range, speed, and reliability. It was close. Aruba was a formidable
solution; but in the end we chose the Bluesocket solution. We have been
very pleased with the system since its deployment, and haven't looked
back once. We have been growing the WLAN steadily, and In fact, we are
about to perform a major expansion project.
We have an all Cisco infrastructure, and have had only one issue
(during initial few weeks of deployment); PoE. Cisco switches
determined that these IEEE 802.3af devices needed the highest wattage
available per port (15.4 watts). This fried about 5% of our initial AP
deployment. Bluesocket support was extremely responsive to the issue;
they RMA'd every AP, and worked with a value added Cisco/Bluesocket
reseller to TS the problem. In the end, we discovered that we needed to
manually set the power per AP port to 9.6 watts (which is the amount
required as per Bluesocket). We haven't had a single issue since.
If you want more information about either the deployment or the
vendor/reseller I used, please fell free to contact me offline. My
contact info is below. I would be happy to help.
Scott Smith wrote:
For years we have been a Cisco and Vivato WiFi shop. I am now being
asked to evaluate other WiFi manufacturers. In the past I've looked
at 3com, Lucent, and Symbol. However, that's been over 7 years ago at
this point.
So I'm wanting any feedback for other types of WiFi other Universities
are currently utilizing, pros and cons, and even ones in the past you
may have used.
I started looking at Colubris, Xirrus, and Symbol as those are the
ones specifically I was asked to look at. However, I'm just wanting
to see what other options there may be, besides Cisco.
--
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Fishel Erps
Sr. Network Infrastructure Engineer
School of Visual Arts
Work LL: 212-592-2416
Work Cell: 646-201-2766
Fax: 212-592-2243
E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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