Good Morning, We added the wireless infrastructure to the 5 year refresh cycle which is used for our wired network. In this cycle specific school buildings are refreshed each year. This helps in two ways; first the budget for 5 years is spread nicely and second we aren’t hit with a large uplift all at once. This may not keep us totally current all the time, but it works.
Wi-Fi is far from the luxury it once was and has become a standard. When students are purchasing new devices with they expect to see the increase in associated speeds. Changing the perspective of executives to understand that wireless connectivity is now as essential (sometimes more so) as wired connectivity is key. A quick poll of your students about the Wi-Fi may open their eyes as well if they are in denial about the need for Wi-Fi. From a Cisco model perspective, it is critical to remove/replace all your non-N capable APs. That should keep you going for the projected codes. Here is a list of APs that should last you a bit: 1140, 1260, 2600, 3500, 3600, 2700, 3700, 1550, 1530, 700. I italicized the 1140 and 1260 because technically they could drop them off code support by year’s end. *shutter* Thanks From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU] On Behalf Of Oliver Elliott Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2014 3:01 AM To: WIRELESS-LAN@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] Replacing ageing APs Hi all I've been looking into EOLs and end of software support for some of our older APs and was wondering what other institutions do to keep their estate up to date. Up to now we've had very sparse funding for wireless as it was always viewed as an add on service. A recent outage (caused by buggy 7.6.120 code) has shown just how important Wifi has become. Up to now APs have been largely installed on an ad-hoc basis with funding from departments or projects but this doesn't tend to account for EOL replacement. We're looking to apply for a formal replacement project based on either rolling yearly replacement budget or a big bang approach every few years. So, how do you guys handle this problem? Oli -- Oliver Elliott Network Specialist IT Services University of Bristol e: oliver.elli...@bristol.ac.uk<mailto:oliver.elli...@bristol.ac.uk> t: 0117 92 (87861) ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
