School Wi-Fi Upgrade – Seeking Advice on UniFi Deployment

[forkies]

2 hours ago, AlphamaleZed said:

Its wifi 6, 6e, 7 in order of release so guidelines are not really clear, i dont think 6ghz is a must personally.

It says WiFi 6E as a minimum. Not 6.

 

WiFi 6E gives you 6GHz, WiFi 6 doesn’t have 6GHz.

 

Again depends if you are going to meet the standard or mark it as unmet on the annual return. Do you have devices or will you have devices that support 6GHz and be able to utilise it in the next X years until you refresh your WiFi again.

 

from the gov page, it links to the WiFi standard:

Wi-Fi 6E certification as part of Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6 offers the features and capabilities of Wi-Fi 6, extended to the 6 GHz band. Wi-Fi 6E delivers improvements that enable Wi-Fi devices to operate efficiently in the most dense, bandwidth-intensive, and dynamic connectivity environments. 

[forkies]

2 hours ago, nicholab said:

From the doc

Can you deliver more than 1Gbit to your AP's i.e. 2.5Gbps, 5Gbps or 10Gbps.

We are running 6U+ and can get 1Gbit Wi-Fi from some clients.

Good point, no point buying and installing U7 Pros for example without the correct switching.

 

We upgraded all our WiFi side switching as part of the project to enable at least 2.5Gbps to each AP, and in some places 10Gbps to the AP as required depending on model, and PoE+ up to PoE++ IEEE 802.3af.bt as required by the APs.

[DavR]

Not sure there's much to be gained from installing 6E, when 7 has now been on the market for a while? Unless people are seeing a significant price saving.

 

We got WiFi 7 APs installed last summer, but we've got the 6GHz turned off at the moment, as nothing the school owns is capable of 6GHz yet. Plus none of our wired LAN, including to APs, is running above 1Gbps yet. But we are at least futureproofed on the APs for a bit. 

[psydii]

15 minutes ago, forkies said:

Good point, no point buying and installing U7 Pros for example without the correct switching.

 

We upgraded all our WiFi side switching as part of the project to enable at least 2.5Gbps to each AP, and in some places 10Gbps to the AP as required depending on model, and PoE+ up to PoE++ IEEE 802.3af.bt as required by the APs.

...and with 30ish laptops on the AP do you ever see more than 1Gbps wire-side? (I know you will with only a handful of clients, but once you load them up can they sustain the throughput?)

[forkies]

16 hours ago, psydii said:

...and with 30ish laptops on the AP do you ever see more than 1Gbps wire-side? (I know you will with only a handful of clients, but once you load them up can they sustain the throughput?)

Yes we hit 2Gbps wireside for some APs regularly, mainly in the sixth form areas. Peak traffic on our Internet today was 3Gbps. Currently we have 36 devices on 6GHz of which 25 are WiFi 6E and 11 are WiFi 7. 203 devices on 5GHz, this is at lesson changeover. Average stats for these clients show 262 Mbps download, 22.5 Mbps upload. Internet is currently hitting 1.6Gbps throughput.

We have had no complaints about WiFi since we upgraded to the latest standards. Before this upgrade, we were having issues probably weekly, that was a 8 year old Unifi deployment.

[DrCheese]

Yes, on our Wifi 7 APs with 5gb backhaul we see a massive improvement on even older wifi 5 devices - 

 

If you think you have 30 devices, all trying to pull 300mbps down a single 1gb pipe, it's going to take much longer than one with a 5/10gbe pipe.

 

If devices can pull more data quickly, they can get done what they need quicker

[synaesthesia]

And how much of this is occurring on a 1Gbit internet connection?  Again all well and good having capable switching but if the end point, where now the majority of traffic goes rather than internally is limited...

This is another example of the DFE's confused "standards" as the recommendation for 1GBit internet seems to be fixed in the past when the majority of shared files, apps etc were locally hosted. Or just why they are so careful with using words like "should". They recommend 1Gb for secondary but do otherwise say "the fastest you can afford".

So each point might be capable of 2.5Gb or more, but if you have 100 of them and each serving X amount of clients, ignoring all the desktops at 1Gb,  that'll soon bottleneck out. 

Would be interested in seeing bandwidth figures at the firewall for some schools - we're only a small secondary and rarely go above 200Mb on our gig line but other than Photography & Art don't have much that pushes the boundaries. Schools with large media departments would certainly see those figures grow exponentially.

[DrCheese]

Some will rely on your Internet connection yes - Tho if you have onsite servers & your edge switches are connected back to core at a decent speed it will still help accessing internal resources.

 

Internet connection - We have 10gb, so isn't the limiting factor for us. It does help when a load of chromebooks hit a single access point all at once.

 

 

Edited April 15 by DrCheese

[FN-GM]

1 hour ago, synaesthesia said:

recommendation for 1GBit internet seems to be fixed in the past

 Considering it's not uncommon for houses to have this now...

[nicholab]

I would not get a leased line, we are aiming for our leased line not to be replaced in 2027 and move to an FTTP service.  Currently, I am waiting for XGS-PON to be deployed on the Openreach Network.

[msi_school]

3 hours ago, synaesthesia said:

So each point might be capable of 2.5Gb or more, but if you have 100 of them and each serving X amount of clients, ignoring all the desktops at 1Gb,  that'll soon bottleneck out. 

 

You are not wrong but if you can get the bottleneck on your wired network is will improve wireless connectivity. The best bet is to allow the wireless network to operate as fast as possible so the clients can complete their actions and not interfere with each other.

 

 

[psydii]

Our 5 minute average on the wireless today has hit over 900Mbps, which I think is a record, but not the full story. The edge firewall actually matches pretty closely to our wifi dashboard:

Not sure which is more significant in supressing the numbers, 

either TCP congestion management and wifi collision domains (which to over simplify TCP will keep backing off every time packets get dropped, and packets are dropped when a link is saturated or collisions happen (which back when TCP was invented, were basically the same thing). So it may be that the busy wifi network (wifi 5 here remember) will be suppressing traffic rates, when we'd intuitively expected to see many more peaks nearer 900Mbps)

Or  the fact that  this is averaging out over 5 minutes there might be a 30 second peak of 900+ and then is drops to the background 250Mbps again, which averages over the five minutes at well lower than the 900Mbps users actually experienced.

 

There are a few 'flat top' peaks in there, which suggest we are hitting internal through put limits on either our internal-vm-based-not-optimised-at-all firewall or wifi  - it shows up in the uploads 200Mbps is about the fastest we see traffic on a busy ap so and we had a class uploading photos at about 11:30 today which coincides with a flat-topped peak in the outgoing graph....  The Download peak around 9am also has a bit of a flat top, and again was likely a couple of AP's serving the same photography class - higher because wifi 5 is much beter with dowload traffic to multiple clients than it is with uploads.

[forkies]

4 hours ago, synaesthesia said:

And how much of this is occurring on a 1Gbit internet connection?  Again all well and good having capable switching but if the end point, where now the majority of traffic goes rather than internally is limited...

This is another example of the DFE's confused "standards" as the recommendation for 1GBit internet seems to be fixed in the past when the majority of shared files, apps etc were locally hosted. Or just why they are so careful with using words like "should". They recommend 1Gb for secondary but do otherwise say "the fastest you can afford".

So each point might be capable of 2.5Gb or more, but if you have 100 of them and each serving X amount of clients, ignoring all the desktops at 1Gb,  that'll soon bottleneck out. 

Would be interested in seeing bandwidth figures at the firewall for some schools - we're only a small secondary and rarely go above 200Mb on our gig line but other than Photography & Art don't have much that pushes the boundaries. Schools with large media departments would certainly see those figures grow exponentially.

We have a 10Gb leased line.
Access to internal servers (if you haven't gone cloud).
Might as well go wifi 7 on your desktops to save on cabling, as upgrading cabling to meet standards for desktops will cost more.

[forkies]

2 hours ago, nicholab said:

I would not get a leased line, we are aiming for our leased line not to be replaced in 2027 and move to an FTTP service.  Currently, I am waiting for XGS-PON to be deployed on the Openreach Network.

What level of SLA would you get with a FTTP service and upload speeds? With more reliance on cloud services, including MIS systems and cloud storage of documents, I would want to ensure a good SLA and backup line which is in the guidance. We have a backup 1Gb line going a different route out the school, and terminating in a separate building.

[synaesthesia]

29 minutes ago, forkies said:

We have a 10Gb leased line.
Access to internal servers (if you haven't gone cloud).
Might as well go wifi 7 on your desktops to save on cabling, as upgrading cabling to meet standards for desktops will cost more.

 

Half/half on that one - I'm probably too old fashioned, but would have to prize hard-wired cabling out of my cold, dead hands  Far less to go wrong, provides a backup and generally once something is done it will last 20 years unlike wifi. Cat5e still hits 1Gb and that's been in for quarter of a century already so value for money wise it's bang on.

Other part of me thinks of less cabling, people playing footsie and ripping them out of walls, chewing gum shoved into RJ45 ports and thinks that'd be wonderful. But whilst all new builds are still being flooded with cat6/6a, makes sense to follow suit

 

The less I say about the 30 year old cat5 cable I found running our heads PC with a chocolate block bridging it to the wall port with a cat6 cable the better!

[smarties11]

Sorry to hijack this thread - but seemed a good place to ask!

 

Those of you using UniFi - which reseller are you using? We are looking at a new WiFi solution this summer and I want UniFi to be in the mix - so recommendations for resellers would be appreciated!

[forkies]

1 hour ago, smarties11 said:

Sorry to hijack this thread - but seemed a good place to ask!

 

Those of you using UniFi - which reseller are you using? We are looking at a new WiFi solution this summer and I want UniFi to be in the mix - so recommendations for resellers would be appreciated!

Unifi directly.

[AlphamaleZed]

2 hours ago, smarties11 said:

Sorry to hijack this thread - but seemed a good place to ask!

 

Those of you using UniFi - which reseller are you using? We are looking at a new WiFi solution this summer and I want UniFi to be in the mix - so recommendations for resellers would be appreciated!

I used to use 4GON now use them as a price match with other companies like MSTDist, Kuiper Tech etc.. they are listed on ubiquiti distributors page with what companies. Friendly people and quick delivery if in stock those 3 companies are decent and do POs etc.. 

 

Luckily saved quite alot and was able to buy unifi stuff for home quite cheap! Be going over to 2.5gb fibre for home soon lol so all the kit works with it.