Hi Brian, What we have generally done is migrated out classes of access points over a period of time. We budget to replace approximately 1/3 of our APs every couple years and our controllers during an 'off-year' every 6-ish. We try and keep the latest tech in our classrooms which does mean a bit of extra work leap-frogging the AP's but has proved quite effective over time.
Provided you stay with the same vendor, swapping out APs or even a controller is simply time consuming and we generally do the APs live during the weekday (2,3,5,10 per day depending on what else is happening) If it takes a couple months, who cares. The controllers we generally do on a weekend or some such, scheduled but still live - bring it up in parallel and then migrate the AP's over to it. Not really any different than a code upgrade on the controllers. Cheers, Jeff From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Brian Helman Sent: Sunday, February 26, 2017 5:11 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] Wireless installation/upgrade funding Everyone: If you're in a public institution of any size, or any institution of an FTE of roughly 8,000 students, how have you handled wireless upgrades? Specifically, have any of your institutions put together a project to perform a forklift upgrade for your wireless networks as opposed to upgrading in smaller chunks (like by building or dealing with coverage holes only)? I'm more specifically interested in how you funded it -- did IT fund it or did the institution? How much money was the Project? I'm putting together a Governance case to upgrade our wireless in two projects -- all of the res halls and the rest of the wireless. Feel free to reach out to me directly if you don't want to answer on here (bhelman .a. salemstate .dot. edu). If I get a decent number of responses, I would like to compile/anonymize/generalize the information and post it back to the list though. -Brian ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss.
