Wall mounting vs. Ceiling mounting your access points

This post stems from the knowledge of how to properly mount your access points. I recently went to do a validation survey for a 5 GHz WLAN, and discovered two of the three access points were mounted on the wall, perpendicular to the floor.

I decided to survey it anyway, and then remount the access points another day when I had the appropriate hardware, and re-survey. I wanted to see what the actual coverage pattern would be – a “before and after”, if you would like to think of it that way.

Here is the coverage of the floor before making any changes. The green and purple coverage patterns are created by two access points mounted “incorrectly”. They’re both hanging like wall clocks, instead of being mounted on the ceiling like UFOs. The brick colored pattern is mounted horizontally, and no change was made to this access point.

Here is the overlapping coverage in red.

I remounted the green access point horizontally about 3 feet from the telepole where it had been mounted vertically. The “purple AP” I had to move from the hallway into the room next to the stairwell since there was no ceiling or structure to mount it to in the hallway.

This is the “after” overlapping coverage area.

I must admit that I expected something a little more dramatic. I used the same laptop, the same adapter, and walked the same path on both surveys.

I’m interested if anyone else has done any comparison surveys like this, what did they show?

Comments

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 homewor...

Easy way to mount a Cisco 3602 or 3702 to the wall with off the shelf materials

Here is an option on how to Cisco AIR-CAP3602I-A-K9 access point to a wall from materials you can easily purchase from Home Depot. (ie, I have done all the homework already) All for under six dollars. Check out last screen capture for the receipt. The access point was designed to be ceiling mounted in carpeted office environments, ten feet above the finished floor. That said, there are areas that we to provide Wi-Fi coverage to that do not fit the above mentioned description – such as manufacturing, warehouses and older buildings. In these cases, we have nowhere to mount the access point. Ceilings may be 30 feet, which is not where we want to install the AP. In these cases we need to install the AP on a wall, approximately ten feet above the floor. The AP does not come with a wall mount bracket that will mount it parallel to the floor, so I have come up with an off-the-shelf solution from Home Depot. The two things from the hardware sectio...

5GHz WLAN Site Survey AP power settings - What you want, don't want, and don't care about.

I often see the requirement that a WLAN site survey and design must be done by the AP-on-a-stick method. That said, you’ll want to use the same AP for your survey that you will use in production – or one that is similar. In this case, we are going to convert a lightweight access point to Autonomous, so that we can use it without a WLAN Controller. The new survey rig is a Cisco 3602i, configured with 5GHz channel 157, set to 40 MHz. How did we turn the lightweight AP into an Autonomous and do the quick and drity configuration? The short answer is, we followed Richard McIntosh’s directions. His blog, and a great “HowTo” is here: https://ciscotophat.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/configuring-a-3602-for-wireless-surveying/ Thanks again, Richard, for putting that out there for everyone to read. We altered the power output of the new survey rig as sort of an experiment to see how the signal propagated, and where our -67dBm an...

Handcrafted Wi-Fi

Search This Blog