Any idea why they are specifying 11ac Wave 1 when Wave 2 APs are current?
Bruce Osborne Wireless Engineer IT Network Oprations - Wireless (434) 592-4229 LIBERTY UNIVERSITY Training Champions for Christ since 1971 From: Brian Helman [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, August 4, 2016 10:57 AM Subject: Outsourced ResNet We're talking with a large college-oriented service provider about outsourcing our residence halls' networking (wireless and wired). Originally, I was going to write this email in a neutral tone, but I'm just not sold on the idea. I AM willing to listen to my peers on this list.... Anyone using these guys? Happy, dissatisfied, neutral? Assuming we look closer, I'd like to know how they handle guests: * student guests during the academic year * non-institutional residents .. ie "summer" guests that may be in housing for 4 days to 2 months * non-student residents (faculty in residence, administrative offices that may co-lo in res halls, etc) Some of our older res halls still have Cat5 cabling. This company is pushing 11ac Wave 1 products. They minimize installation costs by re-using cabling. Their specifications say that Cat5 for runs less than 150' is fine (for gbs ethernet). I'm doing this in my house, so sure .. but thoughts? They don't guarantee a signal strength. They use a device count (4:1). Our 5GHz standard is -60 or better. Concerns? One argument from sr management is -- Wouldn't you like the complaints to go away? My answer is, if we are funded to update the design (most places we currently have a coverage, not capacity design) they'll go away (we have 4 buildings with 11ac, designed for capacity. They are the only buildings we don't get complaints about). I do have consistency of service/experience concerns. Getting the res halls working well is obviously great, but if they then go to an academic building and the experience is different, that's a little more overhead on the Help Desk. I'm also very concerned about diverting funding such that only the res halls are fixed. Any other information .. again, good, bad or neutral .. as to why you used, considered, are using an outsourced service? I'm not going to put the name of the company (starts with A, ends with EE) so my question doesn't show up in obvious searches. Also, I'm only interested in this service as it pertains to wireless (not cross posting to NETMAN). Feel free to ping me directly. -Brian ********** 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/.
