It is close to the entry-level by Cisco. WAP4410N is an AP that is POE
without being a router. Price is around $150.00 I believe. We used them
when initially expanding our wireless from Extreme 300 APs. We still
have some in smaller areas as we fully transition from Cisco to Ruckus.
Harry Rauch Sr. Network Analyst Eckerd College 4200 - 54th Ave S St.
Petersburg, FL 33711
On 11/11/11 12:40 PM, Matthew Gracie wrote:
On 11/11/2011 11:58 AM, Coehoorn, Joel wrote:
If we could provide great / sufficient / pervasive "non-wired"
coverage using
$40 AP instead of $400 Cisco AP, resident might not want to bring in their
own $40 AP.
Actually, you can do that. Those cheap $40 access points can be easily
reconfigured to act as a thick access point by just turning off dhcp,
setting a static IP in the correct range, and connecting your uplink
line to a LAN port rather than the WAN port. Spend about $100 on a
nice buffalo that supports dd-wrt with a customized config file ready to
load, and you can get something close to a vendor system for less than
1/4 the price.
Of course, that means doing a lot of leg work yourself: configuring
access points, setting up subnets/zones, multiple ssids, security, and
every change means a manual deployment to individual access points. I'd
love to see a feature added to dd-wrt that allows polling a config
server for those.
But the really big thing you give up here is the reporting. You can make
up for some of that with existing syslog or gateway reporting tools, but
some of the information you'd get from a controller-based solution is
just not replaceable.
Slightly off-topic, but are there any consumer level APs that support
Power-over-Ethernet? That would be the huge sticking point for me, and
I'm sure I'm not alone. Most people haven't run AC to their ceiling data
drops.
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