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As far as SCA my information may be a bit dated but I will throw it out there.

Extricom - From what I have seen creates a giant single "cell" per radio in their AP's. This may be good for voice but in my recollection limits throughput for the entire switch to what you get in a single MCA cell (again per radio) or about 24 Mbps best case.

Meru - Is it true that their "virtual cells" are only 5-6 AP's? So that if you have a high density switch there really are several virtual cells on different channels and not really a Single Channel Architecture across all AP's on the switch?

With the Meru gear you can have a virtual cell pretty much as big as you want. Certainly not just 5-6 APs.

You can choose to use multiple channels and multiple virtual cells to layer for additional bandwidth if you want. That is usually only necessary for large auditoriums or other spaces where there is a need for substantial capacity.

mattbarber:

How is your network at the college holding up with Meru? Great I can take it from your post. Any lessons learned you can share with us here? I understand your deployment is large with SCA.

Thanks in advance

Hi,

Things are indeed holding up very well. Hard to believe we are coming up on two years with 11n, but we will be there in October.

Our biggest lesson has definitely been client side. At the beginning we spent a lot of time upgrading client drivers and turning off power management settings, especially with Intel adapters. There have been very frequent driver updates to deal with various issues on the Intel 4965, not to mention the Intel 5300/5100 coming out almost immediately after as well.

We have been very happy with the Meru gear and their people and support. The single channel stuff really does work. That has been very helpful, especially when we deploy in new places, because we really only have one person working managing our wireless network (me).

I try and throw my two cents in on the boards whenever I see something come up, but I would be happy to answer any questions anyone has about it :)

mattbarber Escribi?3:

Hi,

Things are indeed holding up very well. Hard to believe we are coming up on two years with 11n, but we will be there in October.

Our biggest lesson has definitely been client side. At the beginning we spent a lot of time upgrading client drivers and turning off power management settings, especially with Intel adapters. There have been very frequent driver updates to deal with various issues on the Intel 4965, not to mention the Intel 5300/5100 coming out almost immediately after as well.

We have been very happy with the Meru gear and their people and support. The single channel stuff really does work. That has been very helpful, especially when we deploy in new places, because we really only have one person working managing our wireless network (me).

I try and throw my two cents in on the boards whenever I see something come up, but I would be happy to answer any questions anyone has about it :)

I have been deploying SCA in about 12 projects now, 1 with meru and the rest with extricom.

My findings are more or less the same, most problems come from the clients / drivers. And ofcourse a bug in the system here and there ;)

Anyway back on topic, i think the biggest advantage for SCA in voip deployments is the roaming, no solution can guarantee roaming the way they do (extricom is actually a bit better in roaming, this only goes for specific environments though).

As of the throughput, this will all depend on how you plan your solution. I believe that with a proper designed extricom solution you will have more throughput then with a meru system, ofcourse depending on the type op AP chosen and how many radios you will actually use.

For example you could deploy:

- 1 radio 802.11a for voip
- 1 radio 802.11n for HT clients
- 1 radio 802.11b/g for legacy clients

This way you can physically seperate client groups in "blankets".

This way you have a seperate channel just for voip. And you can still achieve high throughput without having to worry about QoS for the voip network (at least on the wireless side ;) )

The last I saw was that every Extricom switch in the linup had a Fast Ethernet 100 Mbps interface to the wired LAN. So that is not alot of throughput to share for even a modest number of users.


"As of the throughput, this will all depend on how you plan your solution. I believe that with a proper designed extricom solution you will have more throughput then with a meru system, ofcourse depending on the type op AP chosen and how many radios you will actually use."

The new switches have gigabit interfaces.

anonymouswifidude Escribi?3:

The last I saw was that every Extricom switch in the linup had a Fast Ethernet 100 Mbps interface to the wired LAN. So that is not alot of throughput to share for even a modest number of users.


"As of the throughput, this will all depend on how you plan your solution. I believe that with a proper designed extricom solution you will have more throughput then with a meru system, ofcourse depending on the type op AP chosen and how many radios you will actually use."

Extricom solution has 2 big issues:
1- What the Cisco guys called "the big MAC" pretty self explanatory.
2-their AP can connect to the controller only in l2 via their own switch. So a pretty big limitation for wide deployments or expensive to solve...

Roma59 Escribi?3:

Extricom solution has 2 big issues:
1- What the Cisco guys called "the big MAC" pretty self explanatory.
2-their AP can connect to the controller only in l2 via their own switch. So a pretty big limitation for wide deployments or expensive to solve...

The big mac story from cisco is quite a big blown up story anyway. Actually that document from cisco is quite sad to read. :)

The L2 might indeed be a limitation for some deployments, but by far not in all situations.

Well L2 is a big limitation when it comes to enterprise.
I'm not sure why you say "the big mac" is a blown up story. Can you clarify ;)