topic Wired / Wireless in Wireless

Wired / Wireless

vishal.rane — Sun, 04 Jul 2021 07:47:37 GMT

Hello All

is the time arrived to replace all wired connection for users with wireless. 95% of the users are laptop users

Assuming:-

new campus with 1000 users with mix of apps users, email users, portal users.

should we still invest on wired for users ( keeping telephony not in the scope )

what is missing in wireless to completely overcome wired network for users

Experts please share your thoughts

thanks

Vishal

Re: Wired / Wireless

Johnjcaston — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 08:38:19 GMT

Hi Vishal,,

Provided that the wireless is designed and implemented properly, then there's no reason why wireless can't be used.
You will need to think more about the AP load, not just the coverage, as there might be areas where you may, sometimes, have a high density of users.
Obviously you'll want to make more use of the 5GHz radio due to more non overlapping channels and it suffers from less vendor utilisation than the 2.4GHz spectrum - the downside is that the coverage isn't as good

Bottom line is, make sure that you have a very good AP density in your deployment.

Making use of RRM and CleanAir will help avoid interference and keep the wireless infrastructure operating optimally

I have deployed new sites with wireless only and it they are operating fine, on occasion I've had to add more AP's in certain areas to account for the number of clients

It's a bit of a leap of faith but if you plan and deploy properly, then you should be OK and customers love the added flexibility

Good luck,

John
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Wired / Wireless

vishal.rane — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 09:14:04 GMT

Hi John, thank you for your feedback

Keeping best practise in mind

how many concurrent number of client should be connected to each AP with 3600 series model
how many concurrent number of client should be connected to each AP with 2600 series model

is there a method of calculating concurrent users if the devices are smartphones or wireless phones

thanks again

Vishal

Re: Wired / Wireless

Rasika Nayanajith — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 09:44:23 GMT

Hi Vishal,

You need to think about per user bandwidth you expect to give, I would suggest plan for 30-40 users per AP and plan the cell size accordingly. These AP can support much higher than these values, but if you want to give good experience to users you have to think about capacity.

Adopt as much as 5GHz as it will be the future (at least for next 2-3 years) with 802.11ac waves coming. If you are going to implement any voice, video services (even in future) 5GHz is the best for those. Multicast & QoS is challenging (compare to wired) & thought about those as well.

Also think about WLC models, I would recommend to go with Next Gen WLC (3850 & 5760) with converged access model where you will have more flexibility in time to come. Even though these not supporting 802.11ac now, it is just matter of time & those features will come. If you go with 3600 then you have to get an additional module to enable 802.11ac. I think there will be integrated 11ac AP models in pipe line & will come to market H1-2014.

What is the time line for your implementation.. Decide carefully thinking about future

HTH

Rasika

Wired / Wireless

vishal.rane — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 10:35:24 GMT

Hi Rasika, thanks for sharing ur thoughts

Are there any document from cisco with best practise and recomendation on the number of clients per AP

i noted ur suggestion.

Re: Wired / Wireless

Rasika Nayanajith — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 11:07:17 GMT

Here is the Enterprise Mobility Design Guide-Release 7.3 which covers all the fundementals

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/customer/docs/solutions/Enterprise/Mobility/emob73dg/emob73.html

HTH

Rasika

Re: Wired / Wireless

Scott Fella — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 12:03:21 GMT

Just to add... You really should talk to your Cisco SE as there are other things that you also need to look at and your requirements is pretty slim. Wireless can replace a lot of the wired things, but not all. You also have to look at your core and access switches also with regards to powering up the AP's. with AC, you need to have 802.at or PoE+. As far as density goes, here is one senecio wireless couldn't be replaced. I had an organization that transfers large amount of autocad drawings to and from various servers. The amount of users in an area, we couldn't provide enough density to move them to wireless. This company relays on the wired side. I also had a customer that transfers video and requires an upload of 3gig to be finished in 30 minutes. We needed up having 3-4 clients max per AP.

In schools, we have no issues with one AP in each room that has usually up to 30 kids. Larger rooms we would double the AP for density. In schools, they might surf the web or have to view a YouTube video.

So it varies with what you really have, but wireless will not replace wired 100%.

As far as the converged access, its really up to your. The parity between the converged access and the current AireOS will not happen until mid to late next year. This is still pretty new and does have its limitations and issues, but will be the direction Cisco will go in a few years.

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Re: Wired / Wireless

Leo Laohoo — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 00:36:16 GMT

Agree with Scott.

Printers are the main reason why. Many printers do not support RADIUS/TACACS or even 802.1x. A lot of printers only support PSK. So there goes your security.

Wireless laptop ... all you need is one wireless NIC card going "b0nkers" and you can kiss your local wireless goodbye. If you have that in a wired network, it'll only affect a few users, if you don't have proper switchport security in place.

Remember this main point regarding wireless: Wireless is a SHARED medium. If one talks, all the clients have to stop, wait for their turn before transmitting.

Wired network doesn't share this kind of behaviour anymore.

If you have a brand new office and you have the opportunity to kit the place up, get a wireless site survey done.

Wired / Wireless

Scott Fella — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 01:24:37 GMT

Just to add so your not looking through pages of docs: This hasn't changed from back in the days when the 1252's came out. You are still limited to the gigabit port which you will be oversubscribing.

RF Deployment Best Practices

Some design considerations can be addressed by general best practice guidelines. The following applies to most situations:

•Cisco recommends that for a given AP the number of users per AP be:

–15 to 25 for data-only users

–7 to 8 voice users (using Cisco 792x VoIP wireless handsets or similar) when data is present

Thanks,

Scott

Help out other by using the rating system and marking answered questions as "Answered"

Wired / Wireless

vishal.rane — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 05:43:06 GMT

Thank you all experts feedback.

All printers,scanner will be equiped with wired network

Cisco partners are involved and site survey for 8 storey building reports/recomendation says

max of 4 AP can be installed on each floor ( we got around 90 wireless users on each floor without smart devices )
WLC 5500 series cisco partner recommends ( 5700 series dont support flex connect )
3600 series AP is recommended
2960x series access switch recomended ( cost of 3800 series is high )
ISE recommended for guest, wired/wireless control
prime recomended for ISE management

5700 specifications are nice with 10G support but not sure why some features are missing when compared to 5500 series, flex connect is one of them

Experts share your feedback on the vendor recommendation

thanks

Vishal

Wired / Wireless

Leo Laohoo — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 05:55:35 GMT

max of 4 AP can be installed on each floor  ( we got around 90 wireless users on each floor without smart devices )

We can't comment on this because we don't know the floor plan. What country is this this in?

3600 series AP is recommended

Tell your Cisco people to give you a price for the AP3700. This model, according to our SE, is slated for release by the end of 2013 and will have 802.11ac natively.

Wired / Wireless

Rasika Nayanajith — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 06:03:52 GMT

Was suvery done for 2.4GHz or 5GHz ?

- If it is around 100 users, I would multiply by 3 (3 devices per user) & allow 300 devices connectivity in each floor. Not sure about the floor area size, but max of 4 mean too little for me.

- Is there any use case for flexconnect in this deployment ? 5500 are still good product & in the market for last 2-3 years. Some point in time Cisco will switch to 5760/3850 as they are next gen WLC they want to push it in mareket.

- If you thinking about supporting 802.11ac purchase 3600 with the module, otherwise you have to incurr additional cost to install this modue on AP down the track.

- If you compare performance wise 2960 & 3850 are having hugh differences, technically I would go with 3850 (but if budget is an issue, then it is upto you) but keep in mind 2960 is just layer 2 switch & you cannot have layer 3 running with that model.

- ISE & Prime are the primary policy enforcement & Management of Cisco. Good to have those two products.

HTH

Rasika

Wired / Wireless

vishal.rane — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 06:23:37 GMT

Thanks Leo

Country # United Arab Emirates

did you had a chance to look at major feature differences between 5700 Vs 5500

Re: Wired / Wireless

Saurav Lodh — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 07:01:06 GMT

PFA for IT best practices for WLAN deployment. Its a short doc , very informative though. Hope it helps

Re: Wired / Wireless

Scott Fella — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 11:11:24 GMT

Here is my 2 cents....

Like Rasika mentioned, you now have to look at density no matter what. You either take the number of users and multiple by 2.5 or 3 to be safe and that is how you will determine how many APs you need. I would go with 20-30 max devices per AP also and any large conference rooms or training rooms would get two AP's.

Now you need to look at what you what to do for wireless. The 5760/3850 doesn't support FlexConnect because its a different technology. Since AP's terminate capwap directly at the 3850, FlexConnect isn't needed. The design for converged access is similar to FlexConnect as all traffic is terminated at the switchport and not tunneled back. Now there are some reasons why traffic would get tunneled, but I will not go through that here.

Would I invest in the 3850's... Yes, but also talk to your SE about the lower end switch that will support CA:) you can also do a hybrid setup with 3850's or the newer switch and a 5508 if you wish. The one thing to note is that the license will not transfer from a 5508 to any converged access controller unit acting as an MC. So if you decide to go with the 5508 and later want to go CA or replace the 5508 with a 5760, you will have to buy licenses.

I too would go with the 3600's or even the newer AP, if it does come out in time, but this depends on when your deployment is. ISE is not cheap and Prime is nice to have especially if you go to CA. I have clients that don't have Prime as its not needed to make your wireless work. It's really recommended if your using CA and with the newer version that will work we'll with ISE. With ISE, you need to spec out that correctly depending on how large of an environment you need to support and that's where it starts to cost. It's a good product though, just expensive.

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Re: Wired / Wireless

Abhishek Abhishek — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 20:41:51 GMT

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Re: Wired / Wireless

Leo Laohoo — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 22:36:12 GMT

Country #  United Arab Emirates

For UAE, your regulatory domain is "-E". So make sure when you put your Bill of Materials, your product ID will read something like CAP3602-E-K9.

did you had a chance to look at major feature differences between 5700 Vs 5500

I'd go for the 5508 any time.

Make sure you get a site survey done on 802.11a.

Re: Wired / Wireless

vishal.rane — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 09:27:38 GMT

thanks everyone

Scott, @ HQ lets say 5760/3850 deployed and remote offices got 2960 POE switch with 3600 series AP - will the remote office AP register to central HQ

Remote office connects to HQ over ipsec vpn

thanks

Vishal

Re: Wired / Wireless

Scott Fella — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 10:37:28 GMT

So with converged access, its design is really for access points to terminate on a 3850 or any CA compatible switch. There is a roadmap for a cheaper switch in the future. If you don't terminate an ap to a CA compatible switch, then the capwap will have to terminate onto the 5760/3850 that is acting as the Mobility Controller.

So lets not talk converged access. If you use a 5508 for example, you can use FlexConnect for your remote sites and determine what SSID's you want to terminate locally at the site and what SSID's you want to tunnel back through the VPN. So you have various choices, but in your design without a CA compatible switch, your capwap has to tunnel back to the MC.

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Wired / Wireless

Leo Laohoo — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 01:33:23 GMT

Cisco Aironet 3700 Series Access Points Data Sheet