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High Density Wi-Fi considerations

  High Density Wi-Fi is becoming more popular by the day.  There are many avenues that can lead you to deploying HD Wi-Fi, and I will try and outline them for you. Large public venues – pro sporting arenas, large conference halls, Convention centers and theme parks.  Smaller venues, such as libraries, airport terminals, college/university settings and k-12 may still benefit from high density Wi-Fi designs and deployments. The intended audience for this chapter is for those of you who wish to take a stab at deploying High Density Wi-Fi in your environment.  This is not meant to replace your WLAN vendor’s  professional services –however, it will help educate you and hopefully give you an idea of what the end goal is.  If you are a smaller environment – such as K-12, University, College or other entity and wish to give it a try, this will help arm you with some of the basic strategies and best practices. You may glean plenty of ideas from the plethora of HD Wi-Fi deployment guides freely
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Build your own Ekahau ePerf & Speedtest.mini server!

One a recent forklift project, we decided to replace our aging 802.11a/g hardware and deploy new 802.11ac WLAN gear.   We designed the building with Ekahau’s ESS - our default WLAN survey and design tool.  After designing the WLAN to meet our healthcare requirement (in this case, Aeroscout tags, Vocera badges, 5GHz Voice and data) we installed the gear and then validated the WLAN.   For this initial 802.11ac deployment, we decided to do both passive and throughput validations.  With throughput surveys, we measure actual data, such as packet loss and jitter.   On a side note - for some time now, we have said to ourselves, “I wish we had a portable Ookla Speedtest server”.   Spoiler alert!   We needed a throughput server that would be both simple to use and portable.  After talking with our Ekahau team, we decided to use the Odroid C2, and configure it for two purposes.  (It turns out that Ekahau has done the homework for us, and a quick web search will unearth most of what we need to kn
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Proving "It's not the Wi-Fi network"

  We’ve all been there – or at least most of us have, anyway.  The Wi-Fi network appears to be misbehaving and users are frustrated.   Your users will be working for several hours, and then, it looks to them as if someone shut the entire WLAN off.  Their workstation’s Wi-Fi icon, when hovered, states “no Wi-Fi connections are available”.   Now comes the fun part – well, to me it’s fun, anyway.  Let’s start out with what the normal operation of the WLAN client looks like.  This particular client is stationary.  It’s a laptop that is used like a stationary desktop, and is cabled to the desk via lock and key.  I wanted to clarify that because you won’t see any roaming in this packet capture, and you shouldn’t see any.   Since the client is associated to an AP on channel 36, I set my protocol analyzer to only look at that channel, and then set a filter to only look at the client adapter.  This makes is a lot easier to what’s going on.  I will use this as my baseline, since I want to know w
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How do you stage your access points?

This blogpost is about my quest to refine my access point staging process.   Back in the day, I used to stage the (autonomous) access points in my deployments one by one.  It took a long time to configure each one, and I’ve always been on a quest to perfect the perfect staging process.    Fast forward to 2014, and I find myself surveying, designing, configuring and installing.   With most of my deployments nowadays, I hire Electricians and Telecommunications Technicians to install the access points.  However, I still find that staging the access points myself is usually worth the effort.  I’m a believer in powering up all access points, “burning them in”, configuring them, and labeling them – long before they ever end up in the Installer’s hands.  I guess it is personal preference.  I would rather know that an AP has been powered up, associated to a WLAN controller and has been configured, rather than stare up at a ceiling an wonder why if the AP is “bad” from the factory.  When I prim
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How to get your APs to leave your Cisco WLAN Controller in a pinch!

  You’re probably wondering why on Earth I am writing a post on how to make your access points flee your WLAN Controller.   Here are a few reasons why you might want to do this: (I have seen all of these situations)   ·          You have two WLAN controllers, each backing the other up and you want to upgrade them. ·          You just put a new image on your WLAN controller and it is corrupt, and your access points are hung up on downloading for hours. ·          You want to move your APs to the other controller quickly, but they are on the same subnet and you cannot use a VACL or other ACL. ·          You need to move the APs and don’t feel like scripting, and don’t have WCS/NCS/Prime Infrastructure Access Point Templates setup.   The one in the middle recently happened to me.   Here’s my scenario:   Two WiSM1 blades were half loaded with APs, each backing up the other.  I staged two new 5508s to replace the aging WiSMs.  Little did I know, there was a problem with the image on 5508 #1
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Should I re-design my Wi-Fi, or "swap them out"?

WLAN Site Survey – Should I redesign my WLAN, or just “swap ‘em out” and be done with it? The purpose of this exercise was to design a WLAN for an office building with either the Cisco 3602i or the 3702 series access point.  We wanted to know if we could survey with either one of those access points, and deploy the other, if it came to that, because we didn’t have a 3702 on the shelf.  After mentioning this to Sam Clements, he immediately came to the rescue and let me borrow some gear.  Our new goal was to survey with both APs, configured to the same power level, so we could compare cell sizes.  You can follow Sam here: http://sc-wifi.com/ We (@WiFi_Princesa and I) rigged up a 2504 controller running 8.x code and a mast-like structure that would hold two access points up to the ceiling.  We don’t normally use a WLAN controller to do surveys – we usually put autonomous code on them and configure them as survey APs.  Since this was borrowed gear, I decided to leave it in its CAPWAP state
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