New Wifi - Ubiquiti or another?

[LeMarchand]

Interestingly I just had a couple of quotes for the UniFi nanoHD Access Points and on the bottom of one of the quotes it mentioned about pricing may change depending on tomorrows vote!

 

As the vote has been delayed, do I order now or wait until nearer the time I actually need to order them?

 

Was planning to purchase and deploy during the Easter break.

 

We're out = blahblahblah = price up

We're in = blahblahblah = price up

 

Cynical? Me?

[AlanD]

We have Huawei, and are looking to replace it asap.

When it works, it works fine. But there is no support for it, the company who installed it have been bought out and the new copmany no longer support it

 

What exactly are you looking for in the way of support. Does it just not ...work? Perhaps I've been living in a gilded world. Our Aerohive stuff just worked. Yes the odd access point has failed. Are you expecting them to set up configuration such as SSIDs and VLANs for you?

[Bev]

Mostly it just works.

 

But it’s a concern that if it doesn’t we don’t have anyone to fall back on.

[Andy2789]

Well that was a waste of time, just got the quote back for Huawei. Already being sceptical of the product, my mind has been made up by the fact the price is more than double that of Ubiquiti! That's made the decision a lot easier

[synaesthesia]

Mostly it just works.

 

But it’s a concern that if it doesn’t we don’t have anyone to fall back on.

 

For hardware faults, you have warranty. For questions, modifications, general help etc they're built on systems well known to everyone in the industry such as Busybox and as such there are experts in that even outside of the wireless industry. You'll never go wanting for support even if you never go near Ubiquiti themselves, but they're very good on their forums too. Several thousand pounds is a lot of money for "peace of mind" and "just in case" scenarios.

[Alis_Klar]

For High density WiFi you still need a AP in each classroom as a rule of thumb. You don’t want 30 devices trying to pull a signal through a wall.

 

Also 801.11ax is on the horizon and offers loads of new improvements to the efficiency of WiFi rather than 1:1 speed

 

I’m waiting for Ubiquiti to release their 802.11ax APs

[geoff_nh]

We're also looking at upgrading our Aerohive infrastructure, which is running a mix of 802.11n/ac access points, some over a decade old. It's been a mix of hallway and classroom deployments, and I'm pushing to get one AP per classroom (plus a few for offices, gyms, cafes, etc. as required). I'm hoping Ubiqutiti releases their 802.11ax stuff soon.

 

OP, just curious, why do you think you can reduce your AP count from 70 to 30? No new bands have been introduced that increase the coverage, and in 2019 coverage is rarely the issue, but capacity. You almost never run APs at full power these days. Just because you can get a signal, doesn't mean your performance will be good.

[Andy2789]

Sadly our Wifi isn't even n or ac, looking online it doesn't appear the 802.11ax AP's are going to be released anytime soon which is a pain! When I say we are reducing down, it's because at the moment our AP's don't even load balance. As you said it's not the signal that is the issue. It's the fact they all flood one AP, despite having 5 or 6 within range. And the logic behind reducing, is we will have full site coverage and the performance, previously there was no site survey or logic carried out. There are cases where there is an AP either side of a plaster board wall less than a couple of cm's apart.

[sat_s]

I set up a Meru wireless system in a school, which works very well. Was set up in Summer 2014 and still going strong. Issue with lots of devices on the network in the same area not an issue. We had 100% coverage but when a laptop trolley or iPad trolley was rolled into a classroom we had stuck an AP on top of the trolley which was then plugged into the wall in the room. This increased the coverage in that area, allowing for all devices to stream at the same time. As Meru is not channel based there were no issues with this. We also had something on at the school for parents and allowed around 100 parents to use the wireless with Quizlet, again no issues reported

[TechMonkey]

There are cases where there is an AP either side of a plaster board wall less than a couple of cm's apart.

 

Just to rationalise this, some APs are not omni directional, they pump out in front of them. Now maybe the previous guy didn't realise newer APs did omni directional, maybe these are directional APs or maybe they were directional and in an upgrade got replaced with omni but the installers were told to just replace the current ones. So it isn't such a silly thing to do, and would have been a benefit if they were directional. If you look at some beam patterns of APs you will see most do less projection behind the AP.

[RedwayNetworks_Michael]

802.11AX is now available we have implemented it into a few customers, Survey i think is key though if your current wireless is very old as enviroments do change and i personally think the Wifi design is most important. You can buy cheap APs or expensive ones but if the design is not right they will both cause issues.