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Hi all,

If anyone has deployed a mesh network over a township, suburban development or campus please share your experience.

I have helped in deploying a wireless network over a college campus, but nothing to the degree of robustness of a true outdoor mesh network. I may be partnering with a local company to provide wireless access over a few suburban blocks with the scalability of a very large mesh network. Independent secure access would need to be provided to the police/fire/public safety services with a seperate WVLAN for the typical home subscriber.

We are looking at the Cisco 1510's, and I would appreciate any feedback or thoughts in using these AP's and associated controllers.

Thank-you,
Brett

Lots of pitfalls to be had on this - I've learnt most of them the hard way!!

Providing coverage from an AP on the street into a house is very hard - best way of achieving it is to get your clients to mount antennae on their houses, or to get some little antennae they stick to their front windows. You won't get much / any coverage at the back of a house at all.

Police / Fire / Council / etc... will all have their own IP addressing schemes & security requirements for you to meet. The key thing is to think security, security, security. You must do absolutely everything you can think of to keep the usergroups apart, this means everything from wireless traffic out on the street, to wired traffic on your LAN. Where possible user traffic should be encrypted, and backhaul traffic definately needs to be encrypted.

Do not offer any serious guarantees of uptime or serviceability - urban environments can change very quickly. I've had problems with power supplies (street supplies are much 'dirtier' than residential supplies), power cuts, buildings going up, buildings coming down, and people adding their own wireless networks is always a problem.

Getting permission to use street furnitre can be very hard, and expensive. Often alterations have to be made to the electrical supplies (ie, in a lamp post) and in London, the lamp posts were so old they started cracking under the weight of our kit - we had to buy whole new lamp posts! Never under-estimate the amount of hassle a council can give you!

I could write about this subject for hours - do you have any specific questions in mind?

Rich

hi,
we had implemented mesh technology in our town ship state of qatar in all the public parks.
they are working on aironet 1510 series initially we had problems but later we had resolved teh issue and its working

cheers
srihari

Brett C. Escribi?3:

Hi all,

If anyone has deployed a mesh network over a township, suburban development or campus please share your experience.

I have helped in deploying a wireless network over a college campus, but nothing to the degree of robustness of a true outdoor mesh network. I may be partnering with a local company to provide wireless access over a few suburban blocks with the scalability of a very large mesh network. Independent secure access would need to be provided to the police/fire/public safety services with a seperate WVLAN for the typical home subscriber.

We are looking at the Cisco 1510's, and I would appreciate any feedback or thoughts in using these AP's and associated controllers.

Thank-you,
Brett

I have just read an analysis about using 2 x 2 MIMO for ouside-in WLAN service at 2.4 GHz.

"Empirical Analysis of a 2 x 2 MIMO Channel in Outdoor-Indoor Scenarios for BFWA Applications" in the December 2006 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine.

Although this was a research setup and not using commercial WLAN equipment, the summary was that MIMO could overcome building loss to furnish good throughput.

It is really early for a larger rollout of MIMO, but if home service is an especially important part of the project, perhaps it's worth a thought.

I've done some testing of a MIMO AP inside an office building, and had throughput to a normal client radio hold up quite well.

Charles Preston

Interesting post from Ricardo, I think we met somewhere ! ;-)
I also used quite a few times 1510s, hardware deployment is a key issue.
Security at user level depends a lot on who is using the network, but the backhaul itself is encrypted (nothing you set here, it s such by default).
If different types of users use the same network, I highly recommand the anchor controller feature, where each type of user is sent to the relevant controller (relevant to their ID, and not just the closest).
Covering streets is OK, covering inside houses is not the main focus of this product...
As the others say, if you have any specific questions, glad to help.