scottbailey100@gmail.com
Planning Prevents Poor Performance!
I did drop the fifth P in this old slogan for the benefit of the faint of heart. When you are planning a Wi-Fi implementation it will serve you well to spend some time considering many topics to assure your staff and customers are not frustrated and you wind up having to spend a lot of extra money later to correct what could have been done properly on the front end of the project. Let’s talk about what happens in the planning phase.
Begin with the end in mind.
What are your goals? How many square feet are we trying to cover? How many BYOD’s (Bring Your Own Device) are we attempting to service? How secure do we want this network? Are we going to “hide” it from the public? Are we going to allow “guests” to access our new Wi-Fi? Once we talk about these things we can get an idea about how we want to map out the new network.
A proper plan WILL include a Site Survey.
I use a professional Site Survey tool set that includes a mapping software and a custom Wireless Network Access card that accounts for interfering radio waves and will help you to do the best placement of your access points. A blueprint of the facility is loaded into the software and you begin your Survey and indicate where you are on the blueprint so that it can assist you to in developing your plan. Wall surface materials are taken in to account as well as obstructions such as metal filing cabinets, refrigerators and other appliances. Competing radio signals are recorded and you can also plan for what channels and what frequency band is best for a particular part of your building.
We still need cable installed.
Some folks might think why do we need cable? Isn’t this a “Wireless” network. While you can extend your radio signals in a mesh network implementation you will not get the same performance that you can have with a hard wire connecting each Wi-Fi Access Point back to the network.
Hardware and power considerations.
Not only do you need to make decisions about what hardware will be involved in the project. You will need Access Points and a network switch. Are you going to add power to service the Access Points or will you deliver power via a Power Over Ethernet switch or with a power injector?
Let’s get this down to numbers
We are going to need to budget for the following items.
- Site Survey and plan development
- Cable installation
- Switches and Access Points (factoring in power)
- Network installation and configuration
With all of that being planned for you will still need to make decisions about how you want to secure your network and I’ll go that in my next blog entry
Best of luck to you in your project!
Happy WiFiing!
Any Questions feel free to email me at scottbailey100@gmail.com.