wireless survey

If you're going to be deploying more than one AP, you should ALWAYS do a site survey of some sort, whether that's just you with a laptop walking around, running pings and looking at some little signal strength indicator, or whether it's some kind of professional service using expensive purpose-built equipment.

On the low end, you could just get something like a Cisco CB21AG card, stick it in your laptop, and run the free Cisco Aironet Site Survey Utility ...

Whether you need a professional site survey or do it yourself depends on the size of your project and the performance you require (not to mention your budget.) For example, if you are doing VoIP over wireless and your handsets are roaming throught a building, you'd BETTER do a good site survey. Here's an example of what to do in that case:

Cheers,

Aaron

Thanks for the reply Aaron. The upcoming projects would not be passing VoIP traffic, but it is a large scale project, like a shopping center of some sorts. The AirMagnet stuff on cisco's site is cool, but as i understand it this is after you have purchased equipment and have an AP to talk to, and are worried about where to place it. is this correct? I suppose this is the benefit of paying someone to come in and they would have all the equipment already, correct?

thanks again for the reply,

R

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com schrieb:

Before paying much money for a good site survey, you should define some criteria.

What kind of devices, what performance requirements, redundancy and availability. And also keep different material filling up the room in mind. So you may have completely different reflections/absorbtion of

2.4GHz microwaves.

I can do a professional site survey using the same software in the same building with very different results. Only difference is the card/antenna in the client. Whatever is paid for ;-)

Nonetheless a good site survey also reveals good positioning and saves a lot of APs and the related costs of cabling and mounting.