I see the CleanAir technology as another tool in the toolbox, and it offers a significant increase in the amount of information you can access about your RF space. Given the complexities around wireless and the growing expectation that it be up to the same tasks as the wired infrastructure, having access to the kinds of data CleanAir provides will likely become a necessity.
Do you want to send a tech out to an area with a spectrum analyzer, or look at a real-time report of what's happening in any given space? CleanAir is a win in my book. Our standard has moved from the 1250/1140 Cisco AP's to the 3500 series, and although I still have a rather small deployment of the new 3500 APs, I'm pretty impressed by the capability of the them to expose more of what's happening within the spectrum. It's actually surprising to see the number of DECT phones, bluetooth devices, etc. floating around our campus, and the ability for example, to report on "Worst air quality APs" and find that you've got one that's being hammered with half a dozen "Interferers" is pretty amazing. WCS is a must... Jeff >>> Barron Hulver <barron.hul...@oberlin.edu> 2/18/2011 11:17 AM >>> Does anyone have any experiences with the Cisco 3500-series CleanAir access points? We have a small project (about 40 access points) coming up and I'm thinking about deploying these as a pilot instead of the 1142s that we would normally deploy. I've discussed this will one of my people who handles our wireless deployments (Art Ripley) and he thinks we should. For background, we have most of the campus covered in wireless and a couple of years ago we started deploying for performance instead of coverage (more access points per square foot). We have nine Cisco WLCs (a mix of 4404-100s and 5508s) and a mix of 1131 and 1142 access points. We do not use WCS. Instead, we (Nathan Broome and I) have developed our own wireless management software. This has worked well for us but I'm wondering if I should move to an off-the-shelf package when deploying the 3500s. Any thoughts on this? I've arranged a meeting with our local Cisco sales office next week and this will be one of the topics I want to discuss. Thanks, Barron Barron Hulver Director of Networking, Operations, and Systems Center for Information Technology Oberlin College 148 West College Street Oberlin, OH 44074 440-775-8798 http://www2.oberlin.edu/staff/bhulver/ ********** 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/.
