Tell me why this is a bad idea (or maybe its not!)

[AdamEdTech]

Good evening all,

 

My name is Adam I have been monitoring the forums as a source if information for a while now and I love the amount of information I can find here. I have a question for the group.

 

I am the Network Manager for a small-medium sized school district.

 

12000 students

900 teachers

8000 devices ( ipads, chromebooks, windows 7 laptops and desktops)

15 WAN sites

375 switches, 70 servers (most hyper v)

AD integrated

 

We are in the process of building a new K-5 elementary school around 40 classrooms and I was brought in the loop on the project today when I discovered the "team" decided this would be an all wireless school. Very few cat6 drops anywhere. Only 1 in each classroom for the teacher workstation and 1 in the ceiling for a LAN projector.

 

Chromebooks will be device of choice for this school and there will be 12 per classroom.

 

We do have a high density wireless infrastructure on all of our campuses currently. Cisco 2602 AP's, controller based in flex connect mode. With a WPA2 SSID and an 802.1X SSID. Cisco ISE and Cisco Prime for management. So while our wireless network is robust. Hearing for the first time there wouldn't be drops in the classrooms or labs at this new school for student work stations caught me by surprise. I feel like this is a bad idea but I can't put my finger on why. Other than the host of wireless issues we all face every day. Am I just afraid of the thought of an "wifi Only" design? We will have a Cisco 2602 AP in every classroom. Which brings me to my post title. What do you think? Pro's and Con's to this design concept? What drawbacks am I missing? Am I overlooking a few advantages?

[free780]

Could be interesting with printing.

[Meldrew]

Sounds more like cost saving reasons than anything doesn't it. I'd say don't do it for future proofing reasons. Who knows what next thing might come along and need wired network and to retrofit cabled network after would cost much much more.

 

Meldrew

[Fazza]

Sounds like you need to find a Datacoms company you 100% trust to get on board ASAP to give your School some professional advice on if this is a good idea or not and what the pros and cons are for the school.

[Oaktech]

Our primary school is wireless only except for offices and a wired infrastructure to support the wireless. Their demands aren't massive, but it seems to work well. Their printing is done via Kyocera Ecosys 6030 with wireless cards in the printers and they just work.

[Jamman960]

I'd have to say I feel the same way about wanting fixed devices to have wired lan ports but I guess its kind of a throw back to the days when wireless was far more flaky, I spec'd up our new nursery building to include wired ports for the pc's in the agreed locations only to find that once the furniture went in most of the staff had changed their minds, I'd have told them to forget it before our wireless went in but now I've just stuck wireless dongles in and let them get on with it as the building included 2 AP's anyway. for student devices the only way is mobile in future imo, having a single student workstation in a room no longer provides adequate provision, 2-4 fixed student devices is probably the maximum practical outside of a lab and even that isnt particularly useful. Edited November 11, 2015 by Jamman960

[dhicks]

Chromebooks will be device of choice for this school and there will be 12 per classroom.

 

With a modern managed wireless solution that should, hopefully, be perfectly do-abale. However if you're at still before the building stage you might as well specify as many physical network points in each classroom as you can - they don't all have to be plugged in to a switch, just there and ready to use should the need arise. If you're running cables to each classroom anyway then adding extra points per classroom should be a relativly small cost.

[steveg]

My argument would be that wireless is a shared bandwidth, so anything you can remove from it is going to make it faster for the devices that do have to use it. At the very least remove things like printers from the wireless by having them on a wired link.

 

If it's going to be a school with very few desktop computers, as everyone has a chromebook then yes, the structured cabling requirements can be considerably less, but if there is anything that doesn't need to move, run a cable to it!

 

Steve

[strawberry]

Cant see the benefit, it won't save you much money as there are already drops being made. Things like digital signage, printers, mfds, access control , servers , remote servers will all need Ethernet ( or at least the option of).

[bald_pig]

Seriously, it doesn't cost a great deal more to fit data points, our newest building has over 600 points spread across it!

[Andrew_C]

If this fruit-loopery gets traction, you may wish you'd wired it all!

[dhicks]

if you're at still before the building stage you might as well specify as many physical network points in each classroom as you can - they don't all have to be plugged in to a switch, just there and ready to use should the need arise.

 

Just to add: you'll probably be specifiying quite large, PoE-capable switches - check the network cabinets you have around the school are deep enough for the size of switch, and it's probably going ot be worth getting accousticly muffled ones, too, just because most PoE-capable switches these days seem to be quite loud.

[Fazza]

Just to add: you'll probably be specifiying quite large, PoE-capable switches - check the network cabinets you have around the school are deep enough for the size of switch, and it's probably going ot be worth getting accousticly muffled ones, too, just because most PoE-capable switches these days seem to be quite loud.

 

Not sure they'll be able to do that yet as in the original post they say the building is still being built...

[PotNoodleTech]

I am from the other side of the fence, I only use wireless when there is no other way of doing it. Admittedly running older access points 1142n with ISE and Prime, but still - anything that can be CAT5e cabled, is.

 

I see you've got drops for the teacher PCs, this is the main thing as you can attain 100% network reliability with drops, not so with wireless in my experience.

 

Don't forget PoE network drops for Phones, Printers / Copiers any Digital signage, CCTV etc.

[AdamEdTech]

I agree with just above every post here. There are data drops for printers in each classroom so we wont be printing wireless. My thoughts are we are really don't know what technology will look like 10-15 years from now. The school is not scheduled to open until 2017. The electricians tell me it will be 100 more per drop in each classroom but in a 25 million dollar project that cost is small. There will be offices in the center of a 4 classroom design with data drops for phones and printers as well. Some one above mentioned CCTV. We are being pitched an IPTV solution using streamvu. To deliver the CCTV and other educational programming to the classroom. Streamvu streams using HLS and can be paired with a device to stream multicast. Has anyone demo'd these products or a solution like this?