Good discussion going on here. It should probably be clarified that having a controller does not mean that all the data flows have to or will be centralized.
There are generally three planes: management, control, and data. Almost all the vendors provide a centralized management plan and that's almost a de-facto must for anything but the smallest installations. For many vendors the control plane is also centralized, not necessarily. And it's just in the last few months that vendors are really talking about distributing the data plane, which could become busier with the higher speeds possible through 802.11n. As Dale suggests, there's no need to re-invent the AP management wheel. Frank -----Original Message----- From: Dale W. Carder [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2007 6:53 PM To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Cisco vs. Meru article On Jun 14, 2007, at 1:34 PM, Kevin Whitney wrote: > > Any thoughts or advice on implementing/selecting a wireless system for > use in a High School environment ? Hi Kevin, <snip> For pros & cons on central controller vs "fat" AP's, you should hands down go with a central controller unless you are a programmer willing to write tools to monitor and automate tasks and your labor doesn't figure into the real "cost" of the wireless install. You will still probably want to use a controller later anyway, as that's the only place where new feature development is really occurring. Dale University of Wisconsin & WiscNet ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
