Forum

Anybody out there in Higher ED have any tips on how they did wlan design in their dorm rooms, especially some of the older well built type of buildings. Looking to see how some designs overcome getting proper RF coverage into rooms without over saturating the RF and still able to handle the client density. This would be for a dorm that has no wired ports and all connectivity is WLAN.

Anybody used Meru and SCA for this?

Good luck with this. I just moved my kid into his dorm at his very expensive private university and they still do not have Wi-Fi yet. However the university was more than happy to charge me $300 a semester for "wired" access to one lousy Ethernet port in his room.

I had a long conversation with one of the techs who was heavily involved in completely unwiring all the dorms at GA Tech. As a side note here, I also learned that in addition to Wi-Fi coverage in all dorms, each dorm room gets an external IP address (no NAT-ing) and close to 5MB downstream. They don't mess around there, I suppose expecting lots of Michael Dell or Zuckerberg type entrepreneurs to flow out of the dorms.

Anyway, the end solution that they deployed was a criss-cross pattern of an AP in every other room in the ceiling, covering that floor and the floor directly above it.

LOTS of APs required for full coverage due to the thickness and materials of the walls and floors. Not a great RF environment, but they made it work.

It sounds like the building is a concrete bunker. This will obviously require many APs. You may look at doing something from the outside in. I've done this before on hotels that have been concrete fortresses. If you consider an outside in solution be sure to perform a through site survey. Also consider capacity issues when building an outside in network. For instance 1 AP covering many guest/dorm rooms is a bad idea. Be sure to consider this.

I've never deployed the Meru solution but I know people who have. The USU campus in Logan, UT deployed a campus wide Meru solution, something like 600 APs. I'm sure they have similar buildings to the one your looking at.

kevinsandlin Escribi?3:

I had a long conversation with one of the techs who was heavily involved in completely unwiring all the dorms at GA Tech. As a side note here, I also learned that in addition to Wi-Fi coverage in all dorms, each dorm room gets an external IP address (no NAT-ing) and close to 5MB downstream.

I'm happy to share a design with you if you'll toss me an email....(I'm a wlan engineer at a large university)