Wireless- how do you do it?

[pwaddington]

Presently, my school does not have WIFI but with the advent of the tablets, smartphones and BYOD as a whole, I am trying to gather how your schools manage.

 

My questions are:

 

1) I presume you will use a managed WIFI system, do you limit each mobile users bandwidth so that they do not hog bandwidth?

 

2) how do you get around PAT devices that are brought in?

 

3) do you get the MAC address of all your mobile devices and only let those devices that have registered onto the system?

 

4) have you found that standard desktop purchasing has fallen due to mobile devices?

 

5) is WIFI really that expensive??

 

Thanks in advance

[kennysarmy]

We are just about to go down the wifi route... so my answers are limited at the moment, however;

 

1. We are nt planning to initially.

 

2. What is a PAT device?

 

3. We are not going to; Our plan is to have 3 wlan's. a)trusted user, trusted device, b)trusted user, untrusted device, c)untrusted user, untrusted device.

 

4. I doubt it will, what has helped here is to tell teachers we dont have money to replace their laptops any more frequently than every 6 years, but if they want a new laptop we will provide 50% of the cost.

 

5. We are rolling out around 40 WAP's, central MERU controller - total budget for provision of kit, installation, commissioning is around 50k I think.

[mikkydoos]

How big is your place, how many buildings and how many portable devices do you have ???

 

50K Bloody hell, I could wifi a 3rd world country for that!!!!

Edited June 20, 2012 by mikkydoos

[kennysarmy]

The controller itself is over £5k and each AP is around £700 (700 x 40 = £28,000)

 

Buy right....buy once.....is my motto.....

 

How big is your place, how many buildings and how many portable devices do you have ???

 

50K Bloody hell, I could wifi a 3rd world country for that!!!!

[cpjitservices]

We have 6 Linksys Wireless-G Access Points all around our building over 3 floors, Each AP plugs straight into the switch (Cat6 - POE) the switch is in the "WIFI" Vlan on every port except the trunk port which goes to the router - the router is serving captive portal (user login) over the trunk so when a guest access the wifi they have to have the credentials in order to even use the internet - the SSID's are all the same on the AP's which are all bridged and associated on "WIFI" vlan.

 

It hasnt cost us much, managed to get the AP's for £100 each and the router is just a PC with pfsense on, it all works and does the job!

 

OK so every AP has to be individually configured but thats OK for us as sometimes we need to change SSID's to associate the different vlan's for different floors when staff move offices etc!

 

Over all it costs less than a grand and has been going strong for 2 years now! and signal strength is 96 - 100 % whever ever you go we have complete coverage inside and out of the building... could be due to the rangeboosters on the AP's.

[Soulfish]

1) I presume you will use a managed WIFI system, do you limit each mobile users bandwidth so that they do not hog bandwidth?

We use a managed wifi system, but we don't limit bandwidth. Guest users and students do connect to a different set of SSIDs from staff which have a lower priority however

 

2) how do you get around PAT devices that are brought in?

PAT testing? Whats that?

 

3) do you get the MAC address of all your mobile devices and only let those devices that have registered onto the system?

No. We use private-psk for staff (for their own devices) which limits them to a set number of devices they can use the key on. For guests we use a guest login system which again limits the number of devices. We don't record the MAC address, but the wireless system manages it all.

 

4) have you found that standard desktop purchasing has fallen due to mobile devices?

Our system was designed to complement our desktop infrastructure, not replace it.

 

5) is WIFI really that expensive??

Yes. If you want to do it properly . Our system cost around £60k (+ cabling etc) for 80 access points within 1 building with 4 floors. This gives us site wide wireless, with the wireless specified to cope with 5,000 simultaneous wireless devices.

[kennysarmy]

1) Our system cost around £60k (+ cabling etc) for 80 access points within 1 building with 4 floors. This gives us site wide wireless, with the wireless specified to cope with 5,000 simultaneous wireless devices.

 

mikkydoos could wifi a whole coutry for that (albeit 3rd world!) hehe

[mikkydoos]

mikkydoos could wifi a whole coutry for that (albeit 3rd world!) hehe

 

Slight over exaggeration then lol .

 

80 AP's and management for 60K is a lot m8. Either that or your building is HUGE!!!

Can see how it would stack up though. Even without management its still £750 per AP. I paid £500 for proper DLinks a while back. Lasted years though.

 

Put it this way though, it all depends on what his site is like. Might not even need management. I haven't and Ive got 400 devices on it across 25 AP's. They're close enough to each other to balance the load on 801.11g.

Edited June 20, 2012 by mikkydoos