Offers help for the chicken-and-egg AP planning conundrum
Several of the wireless LAN vendors these days have very slick virtual site-survey and planning tools that make it fairly painless to ascertain exactly where to install access points (and how many of them) to yield the coverage and throughput levels needed throughout a floor or building. Trapeze Networks and Motorola, for instance, jump immediately to mind as having particularly sophisticated but simple-to-use tools.
One gotcha when it comes to designing the placement of the WLAN APs, though, is that you already need the vendor’s products in-house before you can do these detailed designs. This can be a little bit cart-before-the-horse-ish, if you are a Greenfield deployment. How do you know how many APs to budget for or what vendor you want yet before you assess the lay of the radio frequency land?
AP vendor-independent products such as AirMagnet Planner help, in that you can invest first in the site-survey tools and then figure out who your system and AP vendor should be later.
Another helpful tool is a high-level calculator you can use online that determines approximately how many 802.11n APs you will need in your building(s), regardless of vendor, to cover a particular area. The price is right: the tool is available here from Aerohive Networks for anyone to use free of charge.
Though Aerohive sells WLAN APs, it says this tool is vendor-agnostic. It is specifically aimed at 802.11n installations, and the idea behind it is to let you get a ballpark idea of what you are getting into in terms of number of APs you’ll need for coverage so that you can budget appropriately before making a commitment to any one vendor. The tool isn’t meant to provide a detailed virtual site survey that tells you exactly where to place APs for optimal coverage and throughput, like Trapeze Virtual Site Survey and Motorola’s LANPlanner do; it’s more of a pre-planning tool.
You can read or join a discussion about how the tool works and what it can and can’t do at the Webtorials Web 2.0 social networking site. Feel free to ask Aerohive any questions, and get your answers straight-away.
