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
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