UniFi AC Access Ports

[dankingdon]

Hi Guys, First post here on edugeek!

 

We've just bit the bullet and ordered 54 of the new AC units. Hoping to get them on the first batch of stock around mid August. Great price, great features, lets just hope it delivers.

 

Has anyone else deployed the AC units yet? Any good tips for deploying UniFi APs?

[m25man]

UAC installs in exactly the same way as previous UAPs.

They are full 802.11at with a 22w peak PoE requirement, make sure your PoE switches are 802.11at compliant and calculate your PoE budget correctly.

Zero hand off roaming is effectively a single channel blanket hybrid, if you plan to use it the AP's no longer interact with the other APs or software management. You need to do some serious channel planning.

 

As there are no .ac clients to speak of as yet actual usability of Unifi UAP-AC is still to be proven.

One key point is that once .ac starts to go mainstream and we have Gigabit (or near as) clients attaching in larger numbers the Gigabit uplink is going to be well taxed, and the second port is for bridging only (you cant trunk them).

 

Cisco and Xirrus have both detailed optional 10GBe copper uplinks for their .ac access points, we will have to se how UBNT respond to this.

 

Your a brave person to jump to Unifi ac without a proper survey lets hope the rest of your infrastructure holds up to you stacking a gigabit wifi LAN on top of it!

 

So far the UAC has done everything that was expected of it but its far too early to see how it will fair in the enterprise sector especially as we begin to replace wired ports for .ac adapters.

 

I have had to start connecting desktops to g/n networks in certain places recently where it's been unviable to deploy wired links and the 72mb links I have managed to get out of UAP standards have been fine but I wouldn't want to have to hang 30 full users off of a 100Mb uplink, in the same way I don't like 50 users on a UAP Pros Gigabit uplink.

 

I have been a Unifi evangelist, installer reseller and share holder since they first arrived in the EU I love them but... The Jury is still out on the .AC as its going where nobody else has (yet).

54 UAP-AC will probably cover a small county yet alone a school, I guess you can run them all at low power if needs be to use them all up!

 

As soon as I can get some decent .AC USB adapters we can test using wireless workstations, you could actually save a fortune in cabling if it works but I fear we still have a lot to learn using .ac instead of copper.

[dankingdon]

Wow that's a lot of info, cheers.

 

We're mainly interested in just n performance for now, as you said there are hardly any ac clients out there yet. Sadly our budget means we very very rarely get the chance to invest in a good project like this so it has to last.

 

We are already gigabit across the edge of the network, but in need of 10gb back to the core to really make the most of ac, thankfully that wont be happening for a while here. Our current bottleneck is actual demand of data. All our main network links rarely go over 200mb/s so there's just isn't the current demand of data. At least until I get in one day and someone's ordered 100 iPads!

 

We had a few surveys done by other wireless vendors but the pricing was to damn high! Also most of our school is just single story, in multiple buildings made of seemingly 2ft thick lead, hence the large amount!

 

I'm no where near convinced about workstations on wireless yet. We have only recently migrated a lot of teacher machines away from g wireless and back to cabled. Just so much easier and guaranteed connection and bandwidth, perhaps with the new wifi it will be an option again.

 

Tis an interesting time to be in IT!