Phasing in new WiFi system

[CyBeRkId2002]

We are currently in the early phase of my investigating a WiFi replacement and am considering the option of doing this in house.

 

I will be going ahead with consultancy initially, but imagine it is going to advise (as most are one AP per classroom etc.). The cost of this using one of the big brands (Meraki, Ruckus etc.) is going to be huge and being a fan of Unifi (and particularly their cost and licensing model) I wondered two things:

 

If we decide to go in-house the major issue is going to be time for a rollout. We are looking at 100 or so APs, some of which are awkwardly located and lots of which need new cable runs. This leads to the question of time to carry this out! Is such a thing as a phased WiFi switch even feasible where we work round the building replacing within a 3-6 month period. If we match SSID and settings are their going to be issues with roaming between two entirely different network infrastructures?

 

Secondly, does anyone have an recommendations of companies who install Unifi and will carry out a site survey.

 

Thanks in advance,

Michael

[psydii]

Yeah done a phased roll out. Was lucky that I had a lot of network sockets around the place.

 

We had a survey done so we knew the optimal location for APs to meet our SNR and devivce density requirements. THe new APs were so much better than the old ones that we were confident that as long as we had the new ones in the same room as the design we'd have adequate basic service.

 

The new APs had a new SSID. We installed 4 APs in an area and deployed wifi setting to devices that were mostly used in that area to prefer the new ssid, and monitored how things went. Once we had proven that devices within the 4 AP cells were performing extremely well, we identified spare sockets near the target location for the new APs and one saturday just stashed them all into those locations (very very janky). We allowed the APs to get the lay of the RF land (auto tuning/DFS etc). After a day or so we increased the number of devices that recieved the GPO for the new SSID and very quickly moved everybody over to the new APs. We then shutdown the old APs. A few weeks later a team came in and installed cables, containment and mounted the new APs into their correct location.

 

We had a spreadsheet with APs, Network Switch Sockets (temporary) and Network switch socket (permenant) and tracked the roll out and snags through that.

 

There was very little time where both the old and the new were running side-by-side (apart from when we only had 4 test aps), but we had several weeks where the old infrastrcutre was still in place so we had an off-ramp if something wasn't going well with the new kit.

 

The key really is have the necessary cabling in place so you can deploy the new kit in a day, the phases were not one area after another, but one entire "layer" of the system at a time. Planning was key.

[dhicks]

Is such a thing as a phased WiFi switch even feasible where we work round the building replacing within a 3-6 month period. If we match SSID and settings are their going to be issues with roaming between two entirely different network infrastructures?

 

We replaced a Ruckus system with UniFi several years back. We simply set the same SSID and password on the new system as the old and replaced access points one by one. UniFi access points are nice and reasy to install, you just need to drill a couple of holes for the mount and clip the access point on. We did most of the installs in-house, but getting a cabling company in to get to fiddly sections / just do stuff quicker would be a good idea.

[Aprice]

I'd have a chat with ED-UK. I'm sure they'll point you in the right direction.

[NeilSuth89]

On the back of this, I'd also have a chat with ED-UK. They'll do a free survey with heat map then at least you'd know your locations.

[Davit2005]

Personally I'd go for a survey. You can have a lot of issues if there is too much signal in certain places. We had this with a new build, the builders put the points where they saw fit not where we asked. We had years of WiFi issues before we got a proper survey done and ended up turning off 30% of the APs because some were too close

 

Why they do that I don't know. Not the first time either for us. One lot of builders even put the APs on top of metal cable trays

Edited January 31, 2025 by Davit2005

[chazzy2501]

yeah, we just replaced our old APs with Unifi ones over a few weeks. if you are not expanding and already have good Wi-Fi coverage then swapping the APs is the way to go. Same SSID and PW (with same security)

[loxford01]

We went with Unifi on the hosted cloud controller, same SSID and PWs, very easy to setup. Our supplier arranged all the drilling/works/setup of APs. I just had to set the correct VLANs. The Unifi APs work great.

[Chris_Cook]

The 2 issues you will have will be roaming during phone calls or similar, and guest access if you use individual passwords/vouchers.

 

With roaming on modern systems you have 802.11r which skips some of the authentication steps during the roam. if you don't have that or its disabled, then you do a full authentication which takes a few moments longer. The decision to connect to a new AP is up the the client, unless you force a disconnect below a certain signal strength. Different platforms have different thresholds for moving to a stronger AP and when to give up when the signal goes to low.

 

If you do it over a couple of days its probably manageable. Maybe get the new cabling in place first and drill any holes for the new mounts.

 

You could also pre-program the APs before installation which might speed the switch over period.

 

We've run an individual AP from an alternate system at a number of sites. Its not much different to using a range extender or similar at home. As long as the SSIDs and passwords match it should be fine.

 

I would also recommend at least a predictive survey to ensure coverage is optimal. This is really important if you change from 2.4 to 5 GHz or 5 to 6Ghz. The unifi tool is really handy for this, even to just give a rough idea.

[pete]

We typically do a building at a time (Art Block, English Block) if we're doing a phased/test rollout.

 

If we can't do that we'll try to do all the science labs at the same time so people mostly don't have to jump across platforms.

 

But get a survey done - most decent data cabling companies have got the equipment to do it.

[CyBeRkId2002]

Thanks all for the responses - extremely useful to know that this approach (whilst far from ideal) is feasible although ideally will be targeting a 2-3 week window.