You can make a lot of mistakes in deployment and still come out ahead vs paying for engineering. That's to say, the cost of engineering will buy a lot of additional AP's to fill in areas where you guessed a little wrong. When we dealt with 2.4Ghz and the "goal" was general coverage, then engineering helped get you the most bang for the buck. Now that we're designing for 5Ghz, and we're looking at performance/clients per AP, the spacing is so close that materials don't really come into play much i.e. in a residential setting, AP's have moved from hallways into the rooms, and it's becoming typical to see an AP per room and/or AP per suite. Jeff
>>> On Thursday, January 08, 2015 at 9:53 AM, in message <[email protected]>, Jerry Bucklaew <[email protected]> wrote: 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/.
