Wifi survey - how much

[pooley]

How much does a Wireless survey cost from an independant company ? Ball park figures that all.

[dhicks]

How much does a Wireless survey cost from an independant company?

 

You can't just wander around with a laptop showing wireless signal strength and a copy of your floor plans, marking signal strength at points on the plan as you go?

[Hefferzzzz]

Any company that wants to charge you for a survey needs shooting. I know that luke @Millgate can sort these things out free of charge and you will get a proper report back.

[pooley]

Thanks guys as I imagined. Our LA are looking at total wifi coverage as the Welsh Government has given them lots of money to do this. Our LA want to charge between £1500 + £3000 per school per survey!!

[psydii]

One reason to have a wireless survey chargeable is when you are getting Company A to generate a report that you will be using in a specification for a tender involving Companies B C and D.

 

In which case £3K is probably the upper limit - other professionals in their industry are going to review the report so the time and effort to produce it doubles. A decent survey will take at least a day, and often two on site for a Secondary, follow that up with writing a proper report (including building conditions, hazards, etc).

 

Another is if the LA has already contracted them for installation at all their sites, there are probably penalty clauses if there are any problems, so this fee is how the company ensures it a) has done due dillegence and b) generates some cash to pay for the occasional mistake without harming the core profit margin.

[Millgate]

HOW MUCH!?!?!?!?!?

 

We partner with a certain vendor who do the surveys free of charge. We get a details report back and then use that to go and get quotes from whichever vendor you want to use

[pooley]

How much is what I thought!

Bear in mind they are surveying 50+ primaries. I think its a bit excessive!!

[m25man]

Any company that wants to charge you for a survey needs shooting.

 

Work for free do you? I don't think so...

There is no such thing as a free lunch, it will be factored into what you pay somewhere along the way that's for sure.

[paulfinlay]

Find out what kind of survey they are going to do. A full survey with professional surveying tools, i.e. Airmagnet/Ekahau alongside spectrum analysis could well take 1-2 days per primary school plus report writing. That's the sort of survey worth paying for as it will pretty much guarantee how your final wireless deployment will look RF wise. You can also use the data in future to run "what if" scenarios of planned AP location/power/channel changes.

If it's just somebody walking around taking power readings on a laptop, you'll get that for free.

[RichB]

Any company wanting the the business should do it fee. When we looked at doing it, each company did one then provided a quote.

 

That however is for one college not 50+ then not getting the business and been weeks of man hours down

Edited May 24, 2013 by RichB

[pooley]

I'm sure if in went to a company and said I had 50 sites to survey they could do it for a lot less than £100k ?

[SchoolsBroadband]

I'm sure if in went to a company and said I had 50 sites to survey they could do it for a lot less than £100k ?

 

£2k does seem like quite a lot to do a survey and produce a report. Certainly we're nowhere near that/

 

We sometimes charge for surveys depending on the location of the school. I.e if we have to send an engineer from our Leeds offices to Swansea (and this does happen) then effectively its an engineer away for the day + travel costs + writing up the report too. If it's within a couple of hours or we have an engineer going nearby then we'll do it for free.

 

There are also other tools that give a good indication of what coverage you can expect. We use the free Fortiplanner software from Fortinet (as we sell their kit). This is quite good and gives you a pretty good indication of coverage so long as you know how thick your walls are and what they are made of. The best thing is that this can be done by us remotely. It still takes a while to do but gives a good indication.

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[Hefferzzzz]

Work for free do you? I don't think so...

There is no such thing as a free lunch, it will be factored into what you pay somewhere along the way that's for sure.

 

Dont be silly, of course I dont work for free.

 

Yes, it may well be factored into a quote for work that MAY be completed but that WILL be comparable with others who are supply only.

 

Would you expect a decorator to charge you for coming around and giving you a quote?

[catch21]

Nothing surprises me with LAs any more. I know people within school management who would rather spend £5000 on an energy survey than energy-saving measures, and then have no budget left for energy-saving measures. You know one amazing thing we were told? "You can put up a wind turbine." Yeah, I know we could. We honestly didn't need to spend £5000 to figure that one out.

 

If the LA "take control", if you can call it that, just don't get too stressed about it. You never know, you might end up with a decent wifi system.

[nickbro]

Odd, we just had this done, our LA (Powys) did was use the digital blueprints of the school and use the cisco software to place points based on how thick the walls are (they did it without leaving their office). It was then up to use to say, yes or no to where they'd plopped a point on the map.

 

It seems to work out pretty well, our current wifi system uses 20 points, their system would use 21 points. We did tell them to put external points on the table for our school. £20k to spend on infrastructure to meet the digital wales grant is nothing.

 

Also bare in mind, the 20K that needs to cover, the hardware, licenses, structured cable installation, and POE switches. There is also a clause in the documentation for all pcs connected via a network cable for the network down the cable to be gigabit, so new switches are also needed.

 

Powys' offering included dual band (n & b/g) points (our current are single b/g/n points) so we went for that instead of a 10gbps backbone.

[localzuk]

Odd, we just had this done, our LA (Powys) did was use the digital blueprints of the school and use the cisco software to place points based on how thick the walls are (they did it without leaving their office). It was then up to use to say, yes or no to where they'd plopped a point on the map.

 

Such a survey is nearly entirely pointless - it doesn't take into account sources of interference, wall materials, local objects causing multiple paths etc... It might look great on that file, but many people will put it in place and find they have black spots, weak spots and other issues.

 

The cost of doing a survey very much depends on the time it takes to complete. What kind of survey is being completed? How big is your site? How many rooms are within that site?

 

I don't think £1500 is a lot of money for a proper survey to be completed, as it can take a good day to do the actual wandering about on a reasonable sized site, and then a day to complete the report. At professional rates, £750 a day isn't a huge amount realistically (you have to take account of travel costs, potentially hotel costs, the staff costs, equipment costs, insurance, overheads etc...).

[FishCustard]

Personally I'd go down the 'get a spectrum analyzer and do it myself' route, but that of course depends on having the time to do it.

[catch21]

...At professional rates, £750 a day isn't a huge amount realistically .

 

Yes it is, its utterly ridiculous for deciding where to put a few access points.

[localzuk]

Yes it is, its utterly ridiculous for deciding where to put a few access points.

 

Ok, if you think that £750 a day for a business to charge for professional services, how much would you say is reasonable?

[Destinova]

Such a survey is nearly entirely pointless - it doesn't take into account sources of interference, wall materials, local objects causing multiple paths etc... It might look great on that file, but many people will put it in place and find they have black spots, weak spots and other issues.

 

The cost of doing a survey very much depends on the time it takes to complete. What kind of survey is being completed? How big is your site? How many rooms are within that site?

 

I don't think £1500 is a lot of money for a proper survey to be completed, as it can take a good day to do the actual wandering about on a reasonable sized site, and then a day to complete the report. At professional rates, £750 a day isn't a huge amount realistically (you have to take account of travel costs, potentially hotel costs, the staff costs, equipment costs, insurance, overheads etc...).

 

Exactly right. If you want a proper job done, you are going to pay a proper RF professional to do your survey for you. Walking around with a laptop and a 30-day trial of Air Magnet is going to guarantee your wireless deployment will fail.

 

You MUST do an active survey prior to deployment. This is walking around with an "AP on a stick" (the actual AP you are using in the building) and surveying coverage in each location. This measures RF interference in each location and signal propagation. Each locations' survey is merged for an overall view of the floorplan.

 

Post-installation passive survey's are a MUST, in order to validate the design. If you do not have credentials to the SSID being surveyed you are simply going obtain a measurement of RSSI/SNR values. If you have access to authenticate to the SSID, you can also do load/bandwidth testing.

 

Without a validation survey, your installation is pointless.

 

Predictive software that will "plan" your AP deployments for you are complete garbage. If any vendor offers to take a floorplan and drop AP's on it for you without doing an actual site survey, find another vendor.

 

To summarize, a proper survey, done by a trained, knowledgeable WiFi professional, is *not* going to be free. Any survey you get for $0, is worth as much.

[catch21]

I'd say a consultant, as well as understanding Meru vs Ruckus, HP vs Cisco, small business vs enterprise, etc etc etc, should also understand their clients' needs and budget. If you're going into the financial sector, fill your boots. If you're going into government defence procurement, pharmaceutical, multi-national electronics giants, fill your boots.

 

If you're planning a wifi to carry the signalling at Clapham or air-traffic control at Heathrow then fill your boots and stack up on professional indemnity insurance at the same time.

 

But we are talking schools. Institutions with next to no money believe it or not. Anyone in this sector disagree!?

 

Are the classrooms covered? Is the staffroom covered? Library? Common areas? Offices?

 

I think anyone wanting to charge a school £750 a day for consultancy is like a window cleaner charging a pensioner £50 for their one-bedroom ground-floor flat. £750 a day? Understand your clients' needs and budget. I know dinner ladies who could do the job.

[localzuk]

You are being ridiculous, sorry. So a business, which is there to make money, should not make any money because they deal with us in education? Seriously? Not to mention, if you think education has no money, then it is you who are somewhat naive. Just because you don't get a huge budget doesn't mean the money doesn't exist.

 

From your "dinner ladies" comment, I am simply getting the idea that you have no idea about the complexities of installing a wireless network.

 

As I said, give me an amount which you think is sensible.

 

No wonder pay in the IT sector has dropped, and we in education IT get paid so little salaries. People like you undervalue us!

Edited May 27, 2013 by localzuk

[CyberNerd]

A school is going to have the same interference sources as any other business.

Our wireless survey (just under £1000) among other things picked up that we were using an active infrared alarm system (on 2.4GHz). It would never have occurred to me that this was a source of interference without expert help. We replaced the alarm system before deploying the WiFi.

The survey was a drop in the ocean compared to the cost of controller and AP's.

[DrCheese]

I know dinner ladies who could do the job.

w...what? :|

 

If a school is serious about their wifi network, they're already spending a fair chunk of cash on the equipment required. The costs of a £1500 consultancy up front is minor & could save a ton of cash later.

[localzuk]

Put it this way - a school will spend £20k+ on a wireless system. Plus install. £1500 for consultancy to make sure you don't waste that £20k is good economics.