Wifi networking, leaky feeders advice

[Branners]

Just bumping this back up to say I may have found a new solution for my wifi management at work. We are going to be using Aerohive units. You control them through a central web interface, but each unit contains a smaller controller which means if the central management goes offline they keep on going. They also mesh together if they are close enough so that if you lose a network connection it routes through the closest point, and it even does smart roaming where it knows where a client is going and hands them to the next wifi unit.

 

We have been running it in 1 venue for about a week now and had 140 users connected across 2 floors with no issues. Planning on pushing them even harder next week to see what they will do. We have also tied them in to our VLAN network which means from one SSID I can issue one of 5 different WPA2 keys and the key they get decides if they are on the 100mb internet connection, the 50mb, the 30mb, the 20mb or the general WIFI network.

 

I also looked at Xirrus units. If anybody wants a massive capacity per unit (300 users per unit) then thats the one to go for, but at £2.5k per unit it is not a cheap solution.

 

Hope that helps people if they are after a WIFI management solution that doesnt cost the earth.