Wifi suggestions For Ipad Pilot (3 classrooms 40+ ipads)

[Taftse]

Hi Guys

 

I have just been informed that we will be rolling out a IPad Pilot to 40 students i have up to date been able to hold of this deployment

as we have no wifi infrastructure and are getting a new 60 class room building which we hope will be ready in 2016 ( not holding my breath as it should have been built by september this year but no groundworks have been completed yet) and because of this new building i have been told they don't want to invest in any new ICT infrastructure (as we will be getting all new stuff in the new building)

I have now been able to get them to make a compromise that we would fit out 2 to 3 classrooms with wifi for these 40 students

 

Im hoping to use this Ipad pilot as a opportunity to test out a system for full on deployment in the new place

 

what im looking for now is a suggestion on what type of system i should go for we currently have 1 Meraki AP in the staff room which works reasonably well

but would love some feedback on others such as ruckus, muru, aerohive

 

Thanks in advance

 

Timothy

[smithson83]

I would have to recommend Ruckus, can't fault them, we had it installed a few years back in our new building and it hasn't missed a beat, it just works.

 

Incidentally I se you listed Meru as an option, IMO you couldn't go with a worse option, I had a meru setup in our old building, and had no end of issues with it. I'm sure they are great for offices etc but for the numbers involved in Edu it just couldn't cope. Our Ruckus install was cheaper, with fewer AP's simpler to manage, faster and as I said, since day One it has just worked.

 

I know of a few others having issues with Meru also for similar reasons. the way they work ona virtual cell seems to cause a lot of collisions when you get 30+ laptops in close quarters, which seems to be what your going to be doing with the iPads

[FN-GM]

We had Ruckus installed at Xmas, its been nothing but perfect. I can highly recommend it. Its better and cheaper than out previous Cisco solutions. Its really easy to use and setup.

[Taftse]

@smithson83 the only reason meru is on the list is because i was told last week that that the irish department of education has come out and said that meru was the best solution (i get the feeling a brown envelop might have been involved)

i know the education and training board (ETB) this school belongs to has ruckus in a number of schools and wants to get rid of them because of the high support costs but if they are the best and the cheapest then we will have to bite the bullet

 

another thing they did in another school was a netgear network with a single controller and 15 ap's i just dont know what kind of features it has and it has been set up by a useless technician (me being diplomatic he left this current school in shambles)

 

anyway will take your recommendations in consideration

 

any rough figures on the cost of a controller and 3 ap's ?

 

Thanks in advance

 

Timothy

[smithson83]

We don't have a support agreement, never needed it. Maybe that's why its so high, because few people pay for it??? Just guessing.

 

We have the ZoneDirector 1100 with 12x zf7363 APs, looking on LinITX.com it would roughly come to around £2k ex vat

Controller LinITX.com - Ruckus ZoneDirector Controller 1106 with 6AP licence

AP LinITX.com - Ruckus ZoneFlex 7363 802.11 a/b/g/n 2.4GHz 5GHz Access Point

[abillybob]

Xerox all the way. Their wireless arrays are brilliant with interchangeable wireless cards so you can upgrade to AC whenever you feel like it. The dashboard to manage them is also very easy and good to use! Now just got to find a way to get them in my school.... hmmm, we did have them in my old school though!

[smithson83]

as an addendum, if these are going to be close together, you may get away with a few less, we have 12 AP's for overkillness, but even then, most of the school is one ap for every other classroom. The ap's are rated to run 100 clients each (not sure I'd like to test that though).

[craig4gon]

I would agree Ruckus is the way to go - but I would get the AC version ap's - ZoneFlex R700 | Ruckus Wireless, Inc. as lots of the apple products are now utilising the ac protocol

[Oaktech]

If it's only a pilot, get a couple of Unifi as they are cheap and you can essentially throw them away if the pilot doesn't go into production...

[craig4gon]

If you follow Oaktech's lead you could get uap ac and give them a go

[Taftse]

@smithson83 i kind of agree with you about not trying to run 100 clients over 1 ap considering its only connected to one network port @100mb/1gb speed s

@Oaktech was looking at the Unifi option and possible the 3 ap's in a box deal

 

i dont think i can get them to spend 2k on rukus for 3 classrooms i still need them to give me money to replace 90 win xp pc's from 2006

 

 

Thanks again for the suggestions

Edited May 29, 2014 by Taftse

[smithson83]

Although the £2k may seem expensive, nearly half of that is the controller, and when (if) you get the new building, if you went with the Ruckus (of any iteration), one you have the controller and a few ap's, when you want/need to expand, just get a licence for more AP's, throw them up, and let it rip.

 

If you want to test something for the new building, this is your baby

[Oaktech]

2k gets you an awful lot of Unifi - even the Pro (which I think is well worth the money for it's proper POE and gig uplinks) also, you don't need a controller. Just a quick download and away it all goes.

[jayemm]

Hi +1 for ruckus.

 

installed over a year ago an not had any issues. We are a 'scale' deployment of iPads. Evey pupil has an iPad mini, every staff member has an iPad, every teacher has a MacBook. 38 APs giving full internal and external coverage. We get over 1000s clients connected at any one time, with up to 200 on a single AP.

 

Not a fan of meru and Single Cell architecture. I saw it in use at a school and it was s l o w! Their solution of stick another AP up seems odd, but not so odd when you have to fork out another £600 for one. Clever model!

[Taftse]

one thing i like about meraki that im not sure ruckus or any of the others can do is prevent people from login on to a ssid without having a specific mdm profile installed

 

which is one of the things im able to do with the test ap from meraki

 

as in i have a student ssid which can only be accessed if the ipad has a the students mdm setup (meraki's mdm solution) which prevents them from opening/installing games etc

[smithson83]

That's a tricky one, there's definitely a catch 22 situation there. I use Meraki MDM and Ruckus WiFi, not sure there is a reliable way of doing that.

 

You can certainly add wireless setting in meraki and use whatever security methods you want to auth on the wireless, but if your not rolling out the iPads (eg BYOD) and setup the MDM profile from eg apple config, and set it to not be able to be removed...etc etc You cant get on the wireless to access the MDM to set the restrictions.

 

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong... My heads spinning a bit now

[jamin100]

2k gets you an awful lot of Unifi - even the Pro (which I think is well worth the money for it's proper POE and gig uplinks) also, you don't need a controller. Just a quick download and away it all goes.

 

I've done my whole school in unifi for less than £2k

 

Been great ever since it went in at Xmas. Couldn't afford the £11k to replace the existing Ruckus APs with new ones

[gavins38]

+1 for unify. Cheap but really good.

[Michael]

I would agree Ruckus is the way to go - but I would get the AC version ap's - ZoneFlex R700 | Ruckus Wireless, Inc. as lots of the apple products are now utilising the ac protocol

 

None of the latest iOS devices - be it the iPhone 5S or the iPad Air support AC yet, only A/B/G/N on 2.4/5GHz.

 

By all means buy in AC compatible WAPs, but I wouldn't encourage upgrading all devices to AC compatible network cards. Even running N at 5GHz has plenty of life in it yet.

[Michael]

The only Apple device (at the time of writing) which supports wireless AC is the 2013 MacBook Air that I could find.