A lot depends on your staff and their skill set. We did a campus wide wireless installation a couple years ago. The design work was handled in-house and we have been pleased with the results. If you opt to farm out the design work, I would recommend keeping this separate from the implementation RFP. A design/build wireless RFP creates too much room for bid evaluation complications and implementation shortcuts.
Kyle ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jerry Bucklaew" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, January 8, 2015 12:53:55 PM 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/.
