I don't know if anyone is doing this, but I was proposed by a VAR about 10 years ago to put highly directional antenna's in the bottom and the top of the elevator shafts, with the connector cable coming back to a "safe to work in" room. It does depend on the size of the elevator shaft (at the time we topped out at 6 floors). We never actually went forward with this, but we discussed placing a highly directional antenna on the top of the shaft and placing the AP inside the Elevator room that was on the top of the shaft.
We did discuss putting the AP in the car, but at the time, we had no way of getting Ethernet into the elevator Cab, and the lack of a stranded cable of that length turned us off of pursuing it further. On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 10:00 PM, Joachim Tingvold <[email protected]> wrote: > On 1 Dec 2017, at 16:16, Jeffrey D. Sessler wrote: > >> I'm curious about what's driving the need for two AP's in each elevator, >> or to have them there in the first place? Even in medical/hospital >> settings, I typically see an AP placed on each floor in the elevator lobby. >> Given how sticky clients are today, it seems to work very well even for >> latency sensitive services like VoIP. >> > > Hospital, where each floor is almost double the height of normal floors > (where almost half of it is above the ceiling, containing nothing but > metal, pipes, and other non-RF-friendly stuff). Each elevator has it's own > shaft of concrete, and then you can add all the metal in the elevator cab > on top of that. We did some tests, and there's no way clients will be able > to have a stable connection going between floors; at least not when > traversing multiple floors in rapid succession (i.e. going from 1st to 8th > floor without stopping in the other floors). We have APs outside the > elevators on each floor, but that's not enough. > > The reasoning behind two APs is merely for redundancy when an AP or the > Cat6/6A elevator cable fails (they /will/ fail, eventually); the elevators > are in high traffic, making it hard to "just stop one" for hours to fix a > broken cable or exchange a broken AP. We also try to cable "every other AP" > to different IDFs, giving redundancy in case of outage of a single IDF, or > for maintenance cases (where we can software upgrade all equipment in an > IDF, without affecting wireless coverage). > > > It also reduces problems with location-based services because the AP isn't >> changing elevation all the time. >> > > Yeah, I'm not really looking forward to that part. But coverage > > location-based services for this particular scenario. > > > > -- > Joachim > > ********** > Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent > Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss. > ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/discuss.
