Installing 30 waps

Guru · 29 Sep 2011 at 04:30

Hi all,

We have a client who has a hotel with 30 rooms and they have bought one of these for each room:

ZyXEL ZyAIR NWA-3100 - Radio access point

I was just wondering how you guys would recommend setting these up for best performance?

They have existing wireless in communal areas.

The only requirement is that every guest can easily get wireless Internet access. Against our advice they want this unsecured.

Someone suggested having 30 SSIDs one for each room, but there aren't 30 channels and I'm concerned about interference so was considering one huge SSID that is the same as the communal one.

/edit I forgot to mention that each room has it's own Ethernet port patched into a procurve switch and connected to the optional network on their watchguard firewall. This will be configured to use a new separate Internet connection that has been installed purely for the guests to use for free.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

G

Guru · 29 Sep 2011 at 05:23

bremen1874 said:
There’s a good chance the entire project could turn into an expensive train wreck. Is walking away from it a viable option?

What makes you say that? Walking away is not an option.

Guru · 29 Sep 2011 at 18:17

Turns out the waps are wap3205's is there any reason we can't just have them all set to the same SSID with the channel set to the same on all and the mode to universal repeaters?

Guru · 29 Sep 2011 at 21:01

This guy says they have to be on the same channel:

http://zyxeluk.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/wap3205-in-universal-repeater-mode/

I will be the first to admit I am not clued up about using any more than 1 wireless point.

I have suggested encryption, but as their residents are mostly elderly they are trying to make it as easy as possible.

Guru · 30 Sep 2011 at 07:48

Trifid said:
Keep to just 1, 6 and 11. Any other will cause interference as the frequencies overlap. Cisco Access points in autonomous mode have a setting called channel least congested, maybe they will have the same. This will save you having to work out which channel is least noisy for each access point.

Am I right in understand in your OP, you said there was a network point in each room? If so, use this and don't use repeaters. Remember wireless technology is half duplex (can talk or listen) and all bandwidth is shared between all connected hosts.

I personally wouldn't worry about encryption. Not your problem if they don't want it.

Yeah each room is wired, this universal repeater mode claims to make each on work as an access point and a repeater, so we should have redundancy should any fail or any Ethernet cables get unplugged etc fingers crossed.

These was don't scan for congestion like the ciscos, will see if I can find some software to do a survey.

Guru · 1 Oct 2011 at 01:07

We did end up using inssider so thanks for that. The whole thing is incomplete at the moment as the guy from BT who was putting in the guest Internet line didn't rock up until 18:45.

The watchguard didn't seem to like giving out dhcp through all these access points, so we are going to bypass the watchguard when the new line goes live and have the LAN port on their draytek 2830 do dhcp to see if we have more luck.

We installed 20 waps in the end so far but at least 5 seem to have already been turned off by guests as we couldn't connect to them before we had to leave.

Ball ache of a job as a lot of you suggested but regretfully one I had no choice about and no involvement in at any stage before actually putting the kit in

If it had been down to me I probably would have got 6 cisco aironets, one at esch end of each floor and used that to cover it instead of a shed load of £45 units

I would have had new LAN ports installed in the hallways at each end for the aironets to plug into and had not one part of this in the rooms. But then I would have also had it all wpa2 (aes) too so what do I know? lol