Wireless Access Points

[andyk]

HI

 

I was just wondering if anyone could recommend any good Wireless Access Points for use in a large primary school? Ideally they should be easy to set up and the cheaper the better :-)

 

We have laptops and iPads which these would be used for.

 

Any recommendations appreciated.

 

Andy

[Netman]

Ubiquiti Unifi!

 

+1 for Unifi

[LeMarchand]

Another +1 for Unifi.

 

Easy to set up, and while not the cheapest great value for what you get.

[andyk]

Thanks for all your suggestions, the Unifi seems to be the way to go.

 

Chee

[glennda]

Meraki <- Very good and cloud managed,

[bossman]

+1 for Meraki and also Aerohive, both layer 3 switching and routing, cloud managed.

 

Meraki

 

Controller-less, Cloud-enabled, Wi-Fi and branch networks | Aerohive Networks

 

Lots of functionality and scalabilty

[m25man]

Take note of my last words in this post!

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/wireless-networks/74538-wireless-network-vendor-2.html#post665172

 

There is still nothing to compare for the price.

[netadmin]

I had a great experience with Ruckus wireless. Setup was simple and performance was excellent.

[Dos_Box]

Moving to Wireless Networks forum.

[andyk]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions, there are lots of choice out their!

 

I think the Ubiquiti Unifi may the way to go.....

 

I just wanted to confirm that this is the one people are referencing:

Ubiquiti Access Point - UniFi UAP Indoor Scalable WiFi - 3 Pack

 

Thanks

[Netman]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions, there are lots of choice out their!

 

I think the Ubiquiti Unifi may the way to go.....

 

I just wanted to confirm that this is the one people are referencing:

Ubiquiti Access Point - UniFi UAP Indoor Scalable WiFi - 3 Pack

 

Thanks

 

Yep, that's the ones & that's where I get mine - just remember to add the UK cables as an extra unless you have some cloverleaf types spare...

Edited October 23, 2012 by Netman

[andyk]

I know this may be a silly question, but roughly how many devices can connect to this at once?

[LeMarchand]

Those are what we have, though they do a (much more expensive) more powerful one. Never had more than 20 machines trying to connect, so no idea what the max is.

 

As @Netman mentioned, the "special power leads" are standard clover leaf, so you may not need them.

[m25man]

I know this may be a silly question, but roughly how many devices can connect to this at once?

They are allegedly capable of taking 100 users!

I've had 94 on one by accident when I rebooted an adjacent unit and everyone shifted to the only other in range.

Not the recommended load but nobody actually noticed!

We now limit the number of clients to 30 per AP in the controller software and I have 3 x UAP Pro units in the busiest areas all running Hotspot Access with Vouchers for guests.

[johnnyreb]

Hi,

I need to add access points to my school network. How do you find the speed of these for things other than browsing, e.g. google earth? I am concerned that there

is no gigabit ethernet ports on these and there could be a bottleneck with 30 laptops connected to one access point for example.

many thanks,

john

[sparker]

We use aerohive for 600 kids

[Abacus]

The 802.11n wifi technology signals have greater range due the advanced MIMO antenna technology allowing it to penetrate indoors up to 230ft and extend outdoors to a wifi range of 820ft in the best working environment.

 

The 2.4GHz wifi range travels farther through walls and solid objects because of its bigger wavelength allowing it to connect with wireless enabled devices at greater distances, however it operates on the same frequency as common household electronics causing interference.

 

The 5GHz signal wifi range is a much shorter, because it has a hard time passing through walls and objects; however this frequency range is not used by many electronic devices making it free from most electronic interferences.

 

 

The - D-Link DIR-655 N+300 Extreme-N Gigabit Wireless Router

 

 

It's priced around the $60.00 range, and has excellent range and performance!

 

You get great information about this at: http://www.wireless-home-network-made-easy.com/wireless-access-point.html

 

TIP: For best performance results when using a Dual Band router, try connecting all your high bandwidth intensive equipment for streaming video and music in your entertainment area on the 5GHz band, and have all your computers connecting at distant wifi range to the 2.4GHz band for accessing email and html pages.

Edited February 9, 2013 by Abacus
wanted to add a TIP at the bottom.

[wirelesseagle]

In my experience Unifi has been really good. I've tried other access points down the years but Ubiquiti are definitely up there. With them being quite cheap it does open up the chance that they could fail, but the fail rate is still pretty low, I've never had any problems anyway. I found a cool thing here that explains Unifi pretty well - A quick look at the Ubiquiti UniFi Pro- 4G Uncovered