Damien, Depending on the demand in the classroom, we designed our 11n for 2.1 devices per person (chair) in the room. Because we have seen good results with our band steering, resulting in close to 50/50 distribution between 5 and 2.4, we have gotten away with one AP per 40 - 50 chairs. There has been a few times when professors decided to bring a particularly throughput heavy application in the classroom, I try not to take it personally, and we have had to add an additional 11n AP. With the current 11ac deployment we have decided not to change out the single 11n AP and instead install an 11ac AP and have had great results. The standard we promote is 5Mbps up and down per student and we have yet to run into an environment or application that has come close to challenging that with the few areas with 11ac.
To the second question we have seen improvements with both 11n and 11ac clients on the AP832 which could change design parameters. With that said of the 60k clients we see per day here only about 100 are 11ac and therefore we still design around the lowest common denominator. Because we are using Meru I don't know how much this helps but thought I would share. Brandon Stratton ES Network Administrator 2 [email protected] 832-842-4714 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 11:25:48 -0400 From: "Cameron, Damien L." <[email protected]> Subject: Re: 11ac migration question For those that have already migrated some buildings to 802.11ac, what are y= our general findings for AP placement? We have an Aruba environment. Based on guides and virtual surveys using Vis= ualRFPlan it seems like I am coming to the conclusion that an AP per classr= oom (depending on size - mostly medium sized 20' by 20') would provide suff= icient performance. Also is your goal to provide full ac coverage, or full n coverage with ac c= apabilities in classrooms? Thanks. Damien Cameron Network Engineer Norfolk State University Office of Information Technology Marie v. McDemmond Center for applied Research Room 401 555 Park Avenue Norfolk, VA 23504 O: (757) 823-9123 ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
