Colleagues,
We are starting an initiative to upgrade our Wi-Fi infrastructure. Our
current infrastructure was built in-house incrementally over the past
several years. It is 802.n based and not as dense as we would like so
we are looking at moving to 802.11ac with a significant increase in
AP/antenna density to reduce the number of devices associating with each
AP and improve performance.
We are currently working on a RFP for hardware and figured we would do
the engineering layout, installation and configuration in-house. We
had a review meeting with a consultant who indicated that most
Universities do not do the Wi-Fi engineering work in house and usually
put the design in the RFP. This has led us to question whether we are
following best practices for design engineering. We suspect that this
may also depend on the size of the institution and the network staff.
While I’m sure that we could achieve a more optimal initial coverage
plan by hiring someone to do a more detailed analysis of building
materials and RF propagation characteristics, I’m wondering if the
additional time and expense derives a net benefit over doing the design
in house.
So we figured we’d post this to our peers and try to evaluate what the
rest of you have experienced, or are planning. We have developed a
short survey (9 questions) to assess the design approach and a couple
other parameters. It should only take about 5 minutes to fill out, and
as always the more participants, the better the results.
You can access this survey at http://vovici.com/wsb.dll/s/8727g57943
We would appreciate your participation in the survey. I will leave it
up for a week and then post the results back to the list for all to
see. I will segment them into large schools and small schools as I
suspect there might be a difference there. I can segment it different
ways if people want to see it.
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