Wireless Help

[carlday]

Hi All,

 

I am after some advice on wireless we are looking into whole school wireless, We are torn between netgear and HP. Netgear came out and did a site survey and quoted for the equipment, we already had a HP quote but it was twice as much but now HP have matched netgears quote.

 

We have a procurve network (no netgear anywhere in school)

 

Does anyone have any experence in either HP or Netgear WIFI?

Do clients move between APs without losing connection or does the connection drop for a split second?

 

Any help, views would be great.

 

Thanks

 

Carl

[SW-ICT]

I would personally go for hp.. they are the new 3com ... and we havnt had any probelms yet (fingers crossed)

[alunmjones]

we have a Netgear infrastructure here, works well, i dont see anyone droping out, i have the WAG102 AP's 22 of them spread around the school all with the same SSID but different channels, for the most part the laptops stick within 1 or two access points some do move about, i have my HTC HD2 connected to they system all the time, it only drops out when im to far away from an AP, it will always have a little delay when moving from one AP to another as it find the best signal, nothing you can do about that no matter who you go with.

 

all the AP's are connected to various L2 and L3 switches around the school and ar authenticated through radius and certification.

 

works well for us, the only problem i get is when the laptops arnt used for a long while, the server seams to forget that they exsist on the wifi, pluging them in to a CAT5e cable and re-starting solves that, its getting less and less of an issue as they are used more, we have 56 teacher laptops, and 150 student laptops and growing, we have over 500 machines on site in all.

 

you do have to warn people that if they try to connect a lot to one ap it could get slow.

 

the AP we have has a 100mb connection in and 54mb connection out to the laptop, it will always supply the 54mb to the laptops but if you have 30 trying to connect at the same time they will each in fact get only 3.33mb connection, not really a problem when in use but can be an issue if they all start to install something off the sever at the same time.

Edited June 17, 2011 by alunmjones

[carlday]

Thanks for info does anyone have any views of Xirrus someone would like to quote for a xirrus solution.

[featured_spectre]

Xirrus arrays are powerful but expensive (and large). They will definately cope with what you want, but so would Meru, Meraki, Aruba, Ruckus..

 

Speak with @CPLTD or @MarkPower or @Aggy about wireless.

 

As for the 2 listed, if you have a procurve network, then HP is the way to go in terms of uniformity. But in my last testing they were not as good as the above listed brands.

[m25man]

Netgear came out and did a site survey and quoted for the equipment, we already had a HP quote but it was twice as much but now HP have matched netgears quote.

 

That just goes to show how these people have been ripping you all off for years, at the drop of a hat, HP cut 50% off the quote!

 

I saw a quote the other week for a Meru System £27k

 

Hello... we are in a recession budgets are being cut, jobs are at risk... does your school really need a £27k Wifi system.....

 

I dont think so, have a look at the Unify System 40 fully centrally managed APs for under £3k

[chrisgoodrich]

Don't touch the Netgear system with a barge pole, we currently have the net gear solution and in a class of 30 laptops it takes up to 20 minutes for all laptops to login. We are going to go with a Meru network from Solutions Inc. From the POC this was reduced to about 3 minutes but with work to GPO's and other network things this should be reduced to around a minute.

[IanT]

I use HP Wireless Network in one of my schools, its excellent, totally flawless.

 

We have a hp procurve MSM760 Wireless Controller and then about 50+ Hp ProCurve Msm422 Wireless Access Points (B/G/N Support)

 

HP all the way, wouldnt touch any netgear stuff.

[davemoomin]

i would highly recommend the Xirrus system.

 

It’s not the cheapest but it is the best, we have it in our school and can get 90 n clients in three adjacent rooms all logged in in no time at all.

 

The density of users is great and the support is second to none.

 

PM me if you want to come and have a look at it in action...

[carlday]

Thanks for all your help.

 

I looks like we are going for a HP system but we need it configured and have been quoted 4k to configure it has anyone configured a hp wireless before, is it difficult should we be looking at getting someone it to do it or is it something we could attempt ourselves.

[m25man]

What HP Access Points are being supplied with your package??

 

£4k to configure? I take it this doesnt include the physical mounting to the wall/ceiling?

[carlday]

Mounting the access points is being done with the cabling of the network points.

 

The access points are msm410