Aruba Mesh portal / Mesh point?

[TJ7]

I'm looking at Aruba Instant On as a solution for networking a soon-to-be newly refurbished site.

 

I've got to admit, I'm struggling with determining the optimal setup when it comes to the "mesh point" and "mesh portal" roles. We'll be Cat 5e cabling to every point regardless, in order to use PoE.

 

What I'm not clear on is whether setting every point as a "mesh portal" is viable and allows for the points to be centrally controlled. It would apparently make little sense to allow wireless comms between access points as "mesh points" when there's a 1Gbps wired connection available.

 

What are other people doing with deploying Instant On WAPs?

 

If I've completely misunderstood, feel free to correct me also :-)

[psydii]

I just left them at the default. If they can see each other over layer2 / Layer 3 then they use the Ethernet cabling as backhaul.

 

If they can't see each other via the cabling then they come up in mesh mode and use wifi for backhaul. You really don't want them to be in this mode if you have class sets of devices, but its a handy level of resilience if you get a cabling fault.

 

I assume you are using Cat5 because it is already in place? If you are installing new, you really should try to put in CAT6a.

 

For what its worth an 100Mb/s ethernet backhaul is superior to it failing back to a wifi mesh in almost all scenarios where you would be looking to have IAPs.

[TJ7]

That makes sense, thanks for the input. It sounds like they will all happily interoperate as "portals". Using a mesh wouldn't make sense at all, so that's reassuring to know.