After seeing how good of a job Xirrus was doing at LISA year after year, we brought them in to take a swing at our 5200-seat auditorium. We had been using about 20 Cisco APs on a wireless controller with directional antennas and low power, but it simply didn't work out at all. Once we got above about 100 wireless users spread out in the auditorium, it pretty much fell flat on its face.
We now have six of the Xirrus XS16 arrays in there. For data, they have perfectly handled everything we've thrown at them (including doing a fantastic job of taking out rogue APs). Our primary usage modes are one SSID/VLAN that's open for guest access, and another SSID/VLAN for private use that uses WPA, authenticating back to our Cisco ACS servers (which, in turn, authenticate to Active Directory). The one and only issue we have is that voice service on our Cisco 7920 and 7921 phones is not very seamless. We have an SSID/VLAN with WPA for that purpose as well. If you stand in one spot, you can successfully make/receive calls (which is a huge improvement over our original deployment). Roaming between access points - even access points in the same Xirrus array - results in noticeable audio drop-outs, sometimes a few seconds long. -----Original Message----- From: discuss-boun...@lopsa.org [mailto:discuss-boun...@lopsa.org] On Behalf Of da...@lang.hm Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 1:17 AM To: LOPSA Discuss List Subject: [lopsa-discuss] high density wireless When attending confrences in past years I have been frustrated at the quality/reliability of the wireless access. In many cases it's been clear that the person setting things up did not understand the effects of many computers in a small area.. Well, I now have a chance to show that I can do a better job. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
