WiFi Infrastructure – Tech
Thought I should post a bit of “Tech” detailing our WiFi upgrade.
Information on the Hardware
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NexGen recommended, supplied and installed a solution from Ruckus (www.ruckuswireless.com).
We have 42 Access Points placed around the college that are all centrally managed by a Ruckus ‘Zone Director 1000′ Controller. The Access Points are Ruckus ‘ZoneFlex 7492 Access Points’. In high usage areas, such as areas with a lot of laptop trolleys, NexGen increased the number of access points around that area to give more density.
We can say with absolute certainty that we have 100% college coverage.
The solution we chose was based on an 11n solution – to future proof ourselves and provide our staff and students with the best possible solution. Rather than expand further on Ruckus’s 11n solution, here is a link to their 11n page.
http://www.ruckuswireless.com/technology/80211n
Based on the current infrastructure we can easily accommodate 1300 concurrent users on the system (30-45 devices per AP)
Integration into our Infrastructure
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We run 2 SSID’s
College_Wireless & College_Cloud.
The “College_Wireless” SSID is a protected network for our existing college equipment – only Computer Services staff know the password for this SSID.
The “College_Cloud” is an open access SSID that staff and students can use to connect their own devices to get access to the internet – providing they are a current user of our college computer system.
i.e
When you connect via the “College_Cloud” you will automatically be assigned an IP Address from DHCP.
There is an access rule setup on the controller that says that any device is connected via College_Cloud can only talk to our Microsoft ISA server on port 8080… This means that they cannot see any other piece of equipment on our LAN.
When you try to open a web-browser, you are automatically prompted to enter your college UserID and Password – if you supply the credentials you are allowed to browse the internet.
This also ensures that we can have an open-access system without leaving it open to abuse from neighbours / unwanted users.
Comments
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The system went in without any problems and we have already seen the benefits of the system over our old system (22 individual AP’s all with the same SSID – very crude but it did serve us well).
Also, I can’t speak highly enough of NexGen. Azam and Kevin were, and still are, a pleasure to deal with .
This has been pretty much the perfect project. The project was paid for with MoLeNET funds, involves negligible ongoing costs and will serve the college for many years as we have specified the brand new N standard with a density that will support an enormous number of concurrent devices.
