I mostly agree with Brian- we do it all in house, have since day 1, and have seen the work of "integrators" that I can't imagine paying $ for. Not trashing all VARs, but there are some out there that are really thin on wireless experience.
Lee H. Badman Network Architect/Wireless TME ITS, Syracuse University 315.443.3003 ________________________________________ From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv <[email protected]> on behalf of Brian Helman <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, January 8, 2015 1:55 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] RFP question I hate sweeping statements like "most Universities do not do the Wi-Fi engineering work in house and usually put the design in the RFP", and I would have to disagree with it. It has been my experience in working with this group as well as numerous WiFi vendors that it's a pretty even mix of using consultants/RFP, free/paid services provided by WiFi vendor, WiFi vendor/owner partnership or University IT design. Having said that, if you feel your budget will support using a consultant, go for it. Just be prepared to babysit them as they go from building to building. If you are looking for detailed analysis of building materials, I have yet to see a consultant to does the proper survey though -- put a set of radios in a space for a few days and read the logs. Every consultant I've seen just does a heat-map analysis. That's not going to tell you how the coverage works when your classrooms/lecture halls are fully populated. With 11ac, personally I think the design is easier than 11n... because the signals just aren't going to travel like 11n/2.4GHz, so we're all adding radios to just about every room .. in general, not going through more than 1 wall. I'll try to hit your survey and am also interested in what others have to say. -Brian -----Original Message----- From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jerry Bucklaew Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2015 12:54 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] RFP question 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. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
