When building a hotspot type environment, power is needed to cover the whole area. Obviously you have no control over the laptop's abilities. Does a sectorized AP (say 17 dbi 90* sectors) with low power (perhaps XR2 cards with output power turned down) match or best the coverage abilities of multiple APs with rubber duckies?
My thought is that the increased gain of the sectors helps pull in the laptops, allowing for someone to deploy less APs, resulting in a cleaner band. My thought on the XR2s in that they have increased receive sensitivity and cleaner reception than other cards, the increased power output would be negated by a lowering of the transmit power to not step on my own feet, crowd the spectrum, overload close receivers, etc. I would think to mount on building roofs, with downtilt on the sectors and have more than 1 sector cover areas that are likely to have reduced signal due to building density and foliage. Tough areas could just have a smaller AP with a ducky. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com -- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/