Tristan, I assume your dorms are a central hallway with rooms on either side. We initially deployed our Aruba APs in the hallways and had similar issues with Aruba's ARM dropping radio power. We have relocated the APs within the rooms in a zigzag pattern. That resolved the radio power issue since the APs cannot hear each other as well now.
Although we have not used them, Aruba has the AP-93H AP that is a single radio AP that has a built-in switch. It is capable of b/g/n or a/n. You mention that you are designing for 2.4 GHz. Remember that the newer 802.11ac standard is 5 GHz only. Bruce Osborne Network Engineer IT Network Services (434) 592-4229 LIBERTY UNIVERSITY Training Champions for Christ since 1971 From: Tristan Gulyas [mailto:tristan.gul...@monash.edu] Sent: Monday, January 21, 2013 11:35 PM Subject: Re: students per AP in residence halls Hi Tom. The issue we've had is not one of density but one of coverage; in some site surveys we'e conducted recently in our residential spaces, we are finding that one AP might cover only a small amount of students, say, 6-12 reliably. The challenges have been that our residential halls are old, double-brick with all sorts of reinforcement. We are site surveying for 2.4GHz - we can't justify the cost of a high density deployment to support 5GHz everywhere. I have also noticed that HP produce a small active wall-outlet switch+AP which is PoE powered. It is b/g/n 2.4GHz-only (sigh) and is aimed at the hospitality industry. Where are people placing their APs? We currently place them in the corridor, however our challenge has been that the APs see each other and RRM wants to drop the power levels. We also run into issues if we have more than three APs in direct line of sight. I'm curious - how do hotels deal with this problem? They have similar construction and requirements. Cheers, Tristan On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 9:50 AM, Tom O'Donnell <to...@maine.edu<mailto:to...@maine.edu>> wrote: I was wondering what other schools have for a ratio of students to AP's in the residence halls, either definitely or approximately? If you have such a number, how do you count dual-band AP's? They're doing more than a 2.4GHz AP, but not quite as much as two AP's. Then one last related question... Would anyone know their relative mix of 2.4GHz vs. 5GHz connections in residence halls? Thanks. ---------------------------------------------------------- Tom O'Donnell Senior Manager of Network and Server Systems Information Technology Services University of Maine at Farmington (207) 778-7336<tel:%28207%29%20778-7336> ********** 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/.
