Howdy,
I'm glad someone has a successful large-scale Meru deployment, during
our research at Texas A&M we identified similar potential issues with
the Meru solution and we opted to go with a multi-channel solution
(Cisco/Aruba) instead in favor of flexibility and trust in an
intelligent (heh) radio management solution to handle the majority of
channel conflicts and interference.
A major concern is/was the incompatiblity with legacy multichannel
systems, we were moving from an multichannel 802.11b/g environment and
it didn't seem like Meru would play nice. James (Illinois) seems to
have solved this by evacuating the Meru channel and working with his
other groups to ensure they're aware of the conflict.
We were also concerned with what seemed to be Meru playing on the edge
of the 802.11 standard, if not breaking it completely by modifying their
beacon and other aspects.
I'm not totally against Meru, it has several positives. However, I would
just suggest you weigh the benefits and drawbacks and see if your
situation allows you to accommodate the needs and compromises of single
channel versus multi-channel solutions.
-Justin Hao
James Eyrich wrote:
Joe
At Illinois we don't have 10K APs - we have around 2650 Meru APs
installed in over 200 buildings as of today and I find that single
channel works well.
I think it does work with multi-channel neighbors - We provide
wireless in buildings with University groups or commercial tenants
that provide their own wireless, we work with the units to come up
with a channel plan in the locations where the two systems overlap,
they use 2 channels (usually 6 & 11) and we get 1.
We also have several locations on campus where RF research in the 2.4
and 5GHz space is performed. We have been able to work with the
research groups by moving all our APs to a single 2.4 and two 5 GHz
channels. Giving them the majority of the spectrum for research.
Besides explicitly working with researchers and departments that run
their own wireless we have pro-actively given up using channel 6 in
most locations since so many consumer wireless devices use 6 by default.
In general we use a single channel for the majority of a building and
channel stack for extra bandwidth in high density locations.
-Jim
--
Justin Hao
Network Engineer
Texas A&M University
Networking and Information Security
[email protected]
(979)862-2162
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