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Rather than starting a new thread, I figured I'd start by asking this here. I help run a pretty significant trade show in the technology / media / entertainment space. Which, in 2012, translates into a couple hundred exhibitors trying to show off there iPad enabled doohickey. Each one of these guys of course needs his own wireless gear and network because they are often dealing with engineering samples that have hardcoded IPs, can't traverse the public internet and other hoo ha. We are stuck dealing with lots of small, special networks for better or for worse. This has been challenging over the last few years but in 2012 we finally hit the breaking point -- 2.4 ghz was completely unusable on the show floor, including resorting to channels over 11. 5ghz was challenging. We were encouraging anyone on our stage to run off 3g or 4g if possible because it was so bad -- and this is after we went through significant planning exercises. The people who did not go through those exercises typically had stuff that just did not work. I've now been asked to try and figure out a way to keep wifi usable for both exhibitors and attendees at this event. We've got some ideas internally, but we are far from expert in this and I wonder if any of you have encountered a situation like this and had a successful resolution. Just to reiterate the facts of the case are: * One convention show floor, light booth structures, about 200k square feet total. * Typically some house wifi coming from the ceiling, we can get this turned off though. * We've never successfully counted APs, but there are at least 300 and probably significantly more. * Unfortunately, these are paying customers many of whom need a special one-off wifi network so we can't do the logical thing which is to overbuild and provide the wifi in a sane manner. Please let me know if you've got any questions, looking forward to seeing what goondom can add to this debate.
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Nov 14, 2012 23:49
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| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 11:24 |
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Nitr0 posted:Are you saying you have 300 ap's with no central control? No wonder none of your poo poo works. Jesus christ. Yes, we are aware it is a drat near impossible task. Wouldn't be the first time. I'd guess the real number is closer to 500. We've got a few individual booths with 50+ APs, or at least SSIDs. The measurement tool we were using -- the metageek stuff -- basically melted down on the poor laptop that was doing the surveying. We would look at hiring professionals but we haven't found anyone who does this sort of work -- they all want fixed sites and rational scenarios. This isn't one. Even doing a survey is tough. It is a trade show. Lots of folks don't even turn things up until hours before we open. Gets real fun then because you get 15k attendees with ~5k personal wireless networks walking around. bort posted:You do probably need a pro or at least a serious survey. With modern controller infrastructure, you could at least monitor where trouble spots are (e.g. where is there too much 2.4, interference and so forth). This won't help much, since it would be difficult to tell an exhibitor to change his/her configuration. It might be able to work around your exhibitors and allow attendees to use your wireless effectively. High-density deployments with heterogeneous equipment configured by many different people is a difficult challenge for even a seasoned pro. This thread is mostly smaller deployments and the larger ones are often offices where there's central control. I don't think there's any way you could make 2.4 work right and there's certain to be an exhibitor using overlapping channels. This is exactly what happens. End result is nothing works for no one as the noise floor gets to be the entire signal. My understanding of wifi indicates that channels can overlap to some extent, but we get past some extent real quick.
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Nov 15, 2012 01:09
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McGlockenshire posted:Require each booth providing it's own access point be enclosed within a Faraday cage. To be honest, this is what we'd like to do. It just ruins the aesthethic of the show. Might be some cancer angles for folks who get longer-term exposure. SamDabbers posted:It sounds like there isn't any good solution since a) everybody's allowed to set up their own AP, and b) everybody needs a special snowflake configuration. Without having any control over any of the equipment, maybe the best you can do is give every attendee a list of recommendations for configuration. Here are a couple ideas: Thanks, this merges with our current thinking. Good to know we aren't completely nuts. Nitr0 posted:1. Ban all outside access points. Thanks, I'd love to do this if it weren't PAYING CUSTOMERS who want/need their own wifi. Anyhow, #2 sounds interesting -- can you elaborate a bit?
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Nov 15, 2012 16:35
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THF13 posted:How well does the beta firmwares for ubiquiti run? I've also got this question. In our case we are building a tradeshow exhibit with heavy wifi angles. Unifi worked great for us this time and we think that having the roaming capabilities of 3.0 would be great but we are a bit gun shy about reliability. Now, it has been in beta for a while so I expect it is in pretty good shape but I'd love to have some seat of the pants updates if anyone has them.
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Mar 26, 2014 15:54
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Planning a major wifi overhaul here. Cost isn't really an object. Is there any reason to look at anything aside from ruckus?
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Aug 19, 2014 15:03
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Thanks for the suggestions. Anything those guys particularly do better or worse than ruckus?
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Aug 20, 2014 15:45
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Is this an appropriate place for questions about 3g/4g repeaters?
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Jan 28, 2015 23:41
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| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 11:24 |
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beepsandboops posted:Authenticating by AD credentials isn't working for me since the Macs can't get on the network before login, so they can't login with their AD profiles. Would some sort of certificate-based authentication be my best bet here? If the macs are assigned to an individual we use mobile accounts on the mac so they can login off the network. Most of our macbooks travel so we need to do this anyhow. I'm not sure about the pro line but we've got a few Unifi AC units and we've generally been happy with them. Not quite ruckus good but great at the price point.
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Dec 19, 2015 21:41
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