Wi-Fi recommendations for a brand new warehouse / production facility?
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@Dashrender said:
Yeah I was wondering about the "don't mount at the high ceilings" comment too.
I'm no expert - why not mount there? Is ceiling reflection a problem with typical ceiling mounted APs?
Only in Metal buildings, not a problem with drop ceilings/drywall. Not to mention metal buildings have to be bonded to ground (which in an production facility will become dirty). In general WAPs shouldn't be mounted to structural steel or mounted to/below the steel decking
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I don't get where that creates an issue? Is being attached to grounded metal some kind of a sink for signal? Any waves pointing at the ceiling aren't going to the local devices anyway; only the ones radiating below.
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@art_of_shred antennas don't transmit in a perfect circle radiating outwards, it's a fascinating thing to study! Lots of awesome old classified stuff from the cold war radar studies got us beam forming and other neat tricks.
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@MattSpeller Is that supposed to be helpful, or just a random comment? lol
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@art_of_shred I'll post a helpful one in a bit, sorry man. I meant to do more but I've got issues atm.
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I think something like the UBNT Aps would be good since you can centrally manage them. You really don't want to have to single manage 10 APs.
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I've heard some who really like Ruckus. No love for them here?
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@art_of_shred said:
I've heard some who really like Ruckus. No love for them here?
How do they price compare? UBNT Pro APs are $200/ea and the controller is either an $80 etherjack microdevice or software (Free) installed on a server.
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Ruckus are pretty decent. Wished I had one to know more.
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A lot of our companies clients (we aren't in the IT industry) have been having these built into the design of their buildings and I highly recommend the use of something similar. Cisco has a kit for mounting to 2 Gang Boxes.
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uploads are broken
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If you have the dough to spend, Aerohive is really good stuff. Maybe I just like the platform better, but I see now that UBNT has upgraded UniFi, so I might need to thoroughly check it out before I commit to that statement. I just installed the new UniFi tonight because I saw this topic and wanted to check my config before commenting at all. If you want to do it on a budget, but not compromise the quality of the hardware then id go with the UBNT AP like @scottalanmiller suggested. Also I dont really bother with AC at this point because hardly any of my devices support it anyway, and I don't need those transfer speeds.
Keep in mind however ( not that this is a problem on my home network ) I think I recall reading some restrictions on those UBNT AP's. There was and may still be a hard limit of 127 devices per radio ( 127 @ 2.4 and 127 @ 5). In the forums people commented on a soft limit of 32 devices per AP, but I cannot attest to that having any accuracy. I don't know if you still need to configure wLAN groups for ZH (Zero Hand-off) to work, but it used to be that way for sure. Also there was a bug if you had the heartbeat checkbox enabled on the AP, MAC computers would randomly disconnect.
As far as switches go I really dont mind using inline adapters and barrel plugs with ac adapters. Id rather see one inline adapter fail than an entire POE switch, personally. This is really something you need to evaluate yourself.
I dont particularly like using Out-of-the-Box guest network configuration on UBNT equipment. My preference is to configure my own vLAN's and firewall rules. Last I knew you could have 4 SSID per AP, so I configure three. One for the managed network devices, one of personal devices and one for guests. Each SSID can be tied to a vLAN ID and you can introduce bandwidth policing at the SSID level. In my case, the managed network would be uncapped, the personal devices would have a minor cap, and guest networking would be "usable for general purposes". In the firewall I would isolate all three networks and block communication between them.
Anyway... that is my experience with these things. Hope at least one thing I mentioned helps you.
thx
-d
