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Another vendor to consider in any deployment is Motorola, the new radios in the AP650/AP7131 are incredible, and it?s the only AP that has really changed my thinking on design, easier, much easier! I can?t believe that a vendor finally got it right and enables you to design around capacity first and let the other stuff just work its way through. I work with mainly Moto gear also Aruba, Meru, and of course Cisco, and right now in imho a 7131/650 is the best radio out there. You can deploy the AP?s in adaptive mode so no need to bridge the traffic from the WLAN to LAN via a controller, the RFS7000 is just a great way to manage the AP?s and not a single point of failure, and look at the costs, much cheaper than Cisco and much better performance.

Wow, where?s Cisco?s cheerleaders?

You can?t use SNR or RSSI to correctly design a functional WLAN, while RSSI is good indicator of connectivity its meaningless without the ability to pass traffic; throughput. It?s the only reason that I still use AirMagnet, the ability to use IPERF. I?ve surveyed in excess of 100M?/ft and seen great throughput with RSSI in the mid-eighties, but I?ve also seen horrible throughput with RSSI in the high sixties, environment is the key and the only way to accomplish this is with a professional site survey, and like previously mentioned, ?design the WLAN around its perspective STA?s? and do it correctly and your WLAN should work well as long as ?Anonymous and Lulzsec? aren?t in the picture.

If you need good vendor-neutral AND vendor advice, perhaps the CWNP forums are the place to be. The vendors and VARs are watching. :D Apologies to our original poster. :)

I don't mind the vendor responses. We're too far into the decision process to consider other solutions, but thanks for the offers.

I debated about using RSSI instead of SNR, but our students/faculty bring everything you can think of on campus and the calculation of RSSI doesn't seem to be standard across all these devices. Therefore I judged that SNR would be a good neutral measurement to use.