Meetinghouse "commercial" WAP installations

[dnslynn]

Two of the WAPs were placed into the overhead area above the clerks offices on either side of the chapel and one at the far end of the building over the cultural hall stage. Coverage is very good throughout the building.

By overhead area, do you mean in an attic area? Do you have any problems with overheating? The attic over our clerk's offices gets to 120 - 130 degrees in the summer, and most WAPs aren't rated for this. It would be desirable to place tha WAPs here as that should give better coverage over the top of the interior cinder block walls. The old cisco 1200s that the church used to install were rated to 120 degrees, but the newer 1041s are rated to 104 degrees.

[Mikerowaved]

By overhead area, do you mean in an attic area? Do you have any problems with overheating? The attic over our clerk's offices gets to 120 - 130 degrees in the summer, and most WAPs aren't rated for this. It would be desirable to place tha WAPs here as that should give better coverage over the top of the interior cinder block walls. The old cisco 1200s that the church used to install were rated to 120 degrees, but the newer 1041s are rated to 104 degrees.

It appears most of Cisco's products are now rated to +40°C (104°F). This doesn't necessarily mean it will self-destruct above that temp, but it may possibly have a small performance degradation that goes outside of their published specification. (Delivered power out, for example.) With that said, I don't know exactly how warm it gets in the overhead area, as my wheelchair prevents me from getting up there, but I don't think it's near as severe as my home attic area.

Our access points consists of a few donated 802.11g home routers, configured as "dumb" WAPs. They've been up there for several years and have (so far) served us well. At the time, it was the most cost-effective way to get wireless installed in our buildings. Eventually we will replace them, probably with church-supplied equipment.

[aclawson]

I installed wireless internet in all of the buildings over the course of the past few years. When it comes to versatility, ease of use and reliable function I have found that *THE* device to buy is the Engenius ECB3500. The highest power available of any consumer grade wireless device coupled with absurdly reliable connections even at signal strengths below -93dB I was able to get the buildings hooked up with wireless signals easily. Some of these devices have been running flawlessly for over 14 months without a single reboot - they simply work. And with PoE support getting them into place was a piece of cake.

FM is now providing the new authorized WiFi access points and the new firewalls. Since the new guidelines call for hardwired access points for key areas things are slowly moving toward getting everything together as there is going to be a lot of cable pulled, a secure patch panel installed, jacks wired and such. The WAPs are going to run power over ethernet somewhere up in the ceiling - the last time I did that the optimal point happened to be a foot away from the access hatch but we can't always be that lucky.