Better alternatives to Cisco WAP150
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Thanks for the reply, the budget is £500.
The coverage area is one room 13 metres by 6 metres, and then there is a board room/meeting room which is about 5 metres by 3 metres.
Will I need to upgrade router or will it be just a case of swapping the access points out for these ubiquiti ones?
laptops and mobile phones, we have the Cisco WAP150s but they dont seem to be very good they are dotted around the office on the desks
So are they dropping off the Wi-Fi and having to reauthenticate? Or are they staying connected to Wi-Fi but with zero throughput? How many do you have currently?
No access point will give you the performance you want out of it if you're just chucking them on desks and not paying attention to coverage, RF environment, antenna plot etc etc. Don't assume replacing your APs is going to fix your issues.
No access point will give you the performance you want out of it if you're just chucking them on desks and not paying attention to coverage, RF environment, antenna plot etc etc. Don't assume replacing your APs is going to fix your issues.
yes they are having to o re-authenticate. We have three WAP150's at the moment.
I'm looking for advice as i'm not familiar with wifi networking.
Make sure you have the latest firmware installed on the WAP150s.
In a small room that size your WAP150s should be fine. Given them being incorrectly mounted at the very least (on desks) and by your own admission networking isn't your thing then I'm inclined to agree with @Caged Swapping APs isn't necessarily going to help. I'd take your £500 budget and find a local engineer familiar with the WAP150 to come in and make them work for you. I think you'll find you'll get a better result than spending the money on new APs and it is a longer term more sustainable solution as the engineer can educate you a bit on what they've done to fix it. (Basically they'll investigate all the things Caged said and implement appropriate config/install changes)
Where is the third? Should only need 1 in each room.
"Dotted around"? You should just need 1 in the centre of each room
Chucking them on desks should be fine (desktop installation is specifically mentioned for that access point), although ceiling mount is normally the best option. Assuming no obvious interference, then it's likely a configuration issue (wrong channel/standard) compared to the devices in use.
I have done a sketch of the office layout, see my picture, the blue line represents the ethernet ports and the black lines represent walls. The waps are located all on one side of the office because that is where all of the Ethernet ports are located. It wouldn't be possible to put the WAPS in the center of the room because people walk down it. I am going to try Wi-Fi analyzer tomorrow to see if i can locate any poor signal areas.
I have had alook it might be a case that I need to setup a clusters configuration, as per the instructions here :-
https://sbkb.cisco.com/CiscoSB/GetA...3e4fd_h_5182.xml&pid=2&converted=0&offline=0#
LINK TO OFFICE LAYOUT :- https://ibb.co/jWu0Tz
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Thank you I will check the firmware of the WAP150's.
I'm going to use wifi analyzer tomorrow to see where the poor signal areas are. What makes this more important is the cell phone coverage in the area is extremely poor so we would like to make use of Wi-fi calling.