Friday, June 15, 2007
Quick Wireless Access Point survey....
We currently have a very low cost wireless solution in place at Pleasant Valley using basic off-the-shelf routers and access points. I would like to budget for a more commercial grade system and would be very interested in finding out what hardware other churches are using for their wireless networks. I have also thought about implementing a Radius server into the mix but need to do more investigation into that. So...what have you found to be useful in your church's wireless implementations?
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3 comments:
We've been using good old linksys for a couple years now, but are in the process of upgrading just a little to 3Com 7760 APs. The 3Com devices are a bit under $200 each, have better range, and support multiple simultaneous SSIDs, so we have our public and private networks runing of the same set of devices, which really helps us out with the limited channels and overlap.
We run consumer-grade Netgear access points. They're cheap, which means you don't need to run them a long time to get value out of them. We don't treat WiFi as a high-availability service, which is good because it isn't!
As Clif points out, we're not running our Wi-Fi as a high-availability service. If we were to go down that route, I'd be taking a good hard llok at SonicWall's managed wireless infrastructure merely because of its tight integration with our existing firewall from both a security and a management standpoint. Cost-wise, it's about the same as most other enterprise-grade wireless infrastructure from companies such as HP, Cisco, and 3Com.
From a user standpoint, I've been less than impressed with the 3Com - when I was a student at Park University, they deployed a 3Com wireless network that would not play at all nicely with NetGear PCMCIA WNICs. I ended up getting a Cisco A/B/G card that worked beautifully.
Cisco's wireless stuff is nice, but spendy.
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