Extricom wireless solution

[Cableserve]

Hi Simon,

firstly I apologise profusely if I caused any upset to yourself or indeed any other users on the site.

I can only put this down to naivety as I am rather new to the organisation and certainly very new to this forum and so should have taken it upon myself to further research it.

I in no way meant to discredit CPL and will ensure in future to use this web for the purpose which I now believe is intended as a technical support (certainly for me) and an opportunity to air opinions and voice questions to people in the know.

Thanks
Claire

[WirelessITDean]

Hi Simon (CPLTD)

I really do appreciate having the opportunity to speak with your good self and clear everything up.

I hope converse with you much more in the future.
thanks again for the call. (and post)

kind regards
Dean

[CPLTD]

I can feel the love now lol

[russdev]

Feel the love

[GrumbleDook]

I haven't felt this loved up since I was in line for the release of OS X 10.5 ...

Ah ... the memories!!!

[intheknow]

Reply for you,

1.
Reply - Ok in this example I used .11b....throughput on the blanket is approx 5.5Mb. Share this blanlet across the entire school and we could have maybe hundreds of users fighting for that 5.5Mbs.

Cell based I could opt for a .11a network, one AP in each classroom, no co channel interference and have much better thoughput than Extricom could offer?

2.
Reply - I hear that you have to have more AP's available to be "seen" by the client in order to get same band to function correctly....again this means youhave to have a denser deployment of AP's which costs more.

3.
Reply - Missing the point - if you share an "tweaked" antennae with a 2.4G and 5G radio the net effect is both radios will not have maximum tunned antennae for that radio....impact is that in a like for like test vs a traditional AP you will not get the distance. I guess you simply but more AP's in place....but again that means I need to purchase more AP's...

4.
Reply - You make it sound so simple, can you confirm then in a busy office I simply turn True Reuse on and it will triple/quadruple my bandwidth....what if there is no re-use available?

5.
Reply - ok so if I have VoIP on one blanket and seperate all my data onto the other blankets. How do I make sure, when my VoIP blanket is fully loaded, that I can guarantee other VoIP calls wont be dropped. QoS within the blanket is important...is CAC working yet?

6.
Reply - LOL thanks Dean, it confirms point 11. If my Wireless controller fails, then yes I have a standby that, without haveing to un plug cables, will automatically adopt those AP's and recover in about 45 seconds.
Extricom - as far as I know they can't offer this and in a mission critical environment will certainly cause issues.

7.
Reply - Sure understand the reason for fibre, but as I understand it the Extricom switches inly have copper interfaces.....doh! Media converters it is then...doh!

8.
Reply - I need t check this out. If this has changed then great.

9.
Reply - Zyxel and Belden OEM Extricom so yes you are buying Zyxel. Or if you are not you may as well be as it's much cheaper for the same box.......Doh!

10.
Reply - LOL...I love the bit about mission critical being mostly readily tackled by Extricom. Without true redundancy that's not the case.


Reply - stop drinking the Extricom cool ade...take a look at the rest of the market. Extricom does not win hands down my friend and they have a long way to go before they do.


Cheers

intheknow

[WirelessITDean]

okay....
In the words of Samual L Jackson in Pulp Fiction... "then allow me to retort"
1.
Q) Ok in this example I used .11b....throughput on the blanket is approx 5.5Mb. Share this blanlet across the entire school and we could have maybe hundreds of users fighting for that 5.5Mbs.
Cell based I could opt for a .11a network, one AP in each classroom, no co channel interference and have much better thoughput than Extricom could offer?

A) But remember within a 4 radio AP you have 4 separate networks everywhere and depending on the size and construction of the site you will get natural reuse just the same as traditional AP, also the main issue within the school environment is not normally bandwidth but with the problem of concurrent associations on a single AP this is because the traditional AP has to deal with all association and encryption tasks and causes dramatic performance issues when you get to 10 – 15 clients connected. With Extricom the association is with the Switch which can deal with 2007 concurrent associations and the encryption is also done in the switch in hardware not software.

2. Q) I hear that you have to have more AP's available to be "seen" by the client in order to get same band to function correctly....again this means youhave to have a denser deployment of AP's which costs more.

A) In reality within the school environment Extricom usually uses less AP because the traditional way of getting around the association issue is to add more AP.

3.
Q) Missing the point - if you share an "tweaked" antennae with a 2.4G and 5G radio the net effect is both radios will not have maximum tunned antennae for that radio....impact is that in a like for like test vs a traditional AP you will not get the distance. I guess you simply but more AP's in place....but again that means I need to purchase more AP's...

A) I think you have misunderstood each radio within the AP has diverse Ae which is matched to both 2.4 and 5 Ghz but if that’s a problem you can always use the Ext Ae AP and put your own Ae matched to either 2.4 or 5 Ghz.

4.
Q) You make it sound so simple, can you confirm then in a busy office I simply turn True Reuse on and it will triple/quadruple my bandwidth....what if there is no re-use available?


A) No Truereuse is on a realtime basis and x3 is the theoretical max at the moment in the real world you will get between x1 and x3 but even if you only get x1.4 you have got 40% more for free. (they are working on x10 and also truereuse with 802.11n).

5.
Q) ok so if I have VoIP on one blanket and seperate all my data onto the other blankets. How do I make sure, when my VoIP blanket is fully loaded, that I can guarantee other VoIP calls wont be dropped. QoS within the blanket is important...is CAC working yet?

A) Current firmware supports WMM to give QoS within the blanket and CAC should be fully implemented within the next 2 month.

6.
Q) LOL thanks Dean, it confirms point 11. If my Wireless controller fails, then yes I have a standby that, without haveing to un plug cables, will automatically adopt those AP's and recover in about 45 seconds.
Extricom - as far as I know they can't offer this and in a mission critical environment will certainly cause issues.


A) Ask your extricom rep for details on the matrix switch which will sit between the 2 switches (main/standby) and the AP for switchover within 30 sec.

7.
Q) Sure understand the reason for fibre, but as I understand it the Extricom switches inly have copper interfaces.....doh! Media converters it is then...doh!


A) The latest switch range has both fibre and copper Gbit links.

8.
Q) I need t check this out. If this has changed then great.

9.
Q) Zyxel and Belden OEM Extricom so yes you are buying Zyxel. Or if you are not you may as well be as it's much cheaper for the same box.......Doh!

A) Both these are cutdown versions with a drastically cut down feature set.

10.
Reply - LOL...I love the bit about mission critical being mostly readily tackled by Extricom. Without true redundancy that's not the case.

A) See point 6


for the record, i like cool ade!! and am paid to constantly review other vendors. I am General Manager for WirelessIT and have enough time served in this industry, to know what other manufacturers did/do and will offer.
I stand by my comments regarding the Extricom soluton.

would you like me to continue:-
okay......
Cisco = Cell Based, Flawed. lives on marketing and buying out other vendors then adding to range.. AIR. check out on google.
Trapeze = Cell based, Flawed (bought out by Belden. see Q&A 9 above)
Aruba = Cell based. Flawed. over priced. over complicated. over the top. too much overhead traffic and intelligence in APs therefore reducing throughput for clients.
meru = cell based. flawed.
Air Defense acquired by Motorola
Bluesocket sold its IP Telephony business to Nortel
HP Procurve has acquired Colubris and I like Colubris' external RF offering but Extricoms internal offering is still (sorry Brian if you ever get to read this) a far better solution.

Gotta Sign off now unfortunately, i could do this all day (infact i am going to be, just not on here) but got work to do.

Pleasure as always
Keep Well Ya'll

Kind regards
Dean

[Starkiller]

Hi All
I just had an Extricom exsw-1200 switch installed with 8 waps. It worked when the chapie set it up on the day. Now a couple of weeks later its just losing connection.

Wired thing is the RM Intel laptops (WinXP Pro RM setup) will detect the wlan but no mappings, IE or local pinging will work. I get hardware error, request timed out.

I have 16 RM NBOOK 150 that will not work. My Tos will connect only when I reset the switch. Can't even get the HP nx6110 to connect too.

Extricom was so kind to reply, but the new config didn't work either.
HELP PLEASE!!!

[MarkPower]

Originally Posted by john

Can I point you to our good friends at Net+Ctrl please who do Ruckus Wifi which is designed with VOIP comms in mind They presented at the Northeren Conference and we have a few members on here that have got trial kit from them and / or bought it now or are saying they will be doing ASAP.

Contact is Mark Power 01473 281 211

Net-Ctrl - Ruckus Wireless is the page and there site. I know Mark is going for a few days well earned rest before too much longer (if not already gone) but one of the team there will be happy to sort you out im very sure.

Not managed to get that holiday yet so would be happy to discuss Ruckus Wireless with anyone, even if you are just after a comparitive solution to make up your minds.

The costs element has provided a substancial saving for education without compromising on the quality, infact Ruckus has won a number of awards this year for best technology especialy around the antenna systems.

go on give it a look see what all the Ruckus is about (sorry could not resist)


Cheers

Mark

[techie08]

We've just had the Extricom Wireless solution fitted here and to be honest i can fault it. I had 30 laptops loged in one room and 24 streaming video from BBC iplayer. Soon as it was more than 24 it just started to get slightly intermittant.

We've also gone for the 'N' standard because all our staff laptops have wireless N Cards and its been great.

I like the fact it acts just like a wired network and manageablity is easy!

[tomscaper]

We had a quote from Extricom for 16 AP's and 2 switches which came to over 21k, the technology looks really great and would work wonders but it is very pricey.

[forcryingoutloud]

We had a demo a few months back and it's really impressive - We're looking at combining it with our new VOIP system in April

[Starkiller]

Originally Posted by techie08

We've just had the Extricom Wireless solution fitted here and to be honest i can fault it. I had 30 laptops loged in one room and 24 streaming video from BBC iplayer. Soon as it was more than 24 it just started to get slightly intermittant.

We've also gone for the 'N' standard because all our staff laptops have wireless N Cards and its been great.

I like the fact it acts just like a wired network and manageablity is easy!

Well mate thats good news for you, but I can't get my 16 RM Intel notebooks to accept student logins without first login with a cached account then logoff so that the studnet can logon. It seems you now something I need to know - care to share?

[techie08]

Originally Posted by Starkiller

Well mate thats good news for you, but I can't get my 16 RM Intel notebooks to accept student logins without first login with a cached account then logoff so that the studnet can logon. It seems you now something I need to know - care to share?

Have you got the latest WLAN driver installed?

[Starkiller]

Originally Posted by techie08

Have you got the latest WLAN driver installed?

Yep its the RM 150 laptop, cant remember the chipset details, but we did download the latest driver for them.