Air-CAP 3502, any advantage to an external antenna?

[robheaplogin]

Hi All

Im looking to replace our current Air-Cap 3501s with 3502s to ake advantage of the 5Ghz band, we currently run 16 APs over about 22000 sq feet and we have a couple of 5508 controllers.

I'm based in an office right in the center of the city hence its a rather nosiy RF environment, we see upwards of 300 APs in the 2.4Ghz band competing with ours and this seems to be increasing by the day.

Question is will we seen any advantage in using external antenna as suggested by one of our vendors? Cisco say external antenna are for use in challenging environmnents but does this mean a high level of RF interference or for say an open plan warehouse where sheer RF radiated power is important?

[Stephen Rodriguez]

No, you won't really see any benefit for an office space.  The antenna you would use in there is very similar gain and pattern wise to the internal antenna.

When they are refferencing challenging environments, they are speaking of places where you need really high gain antenna, or the need for patch antennas to direct the pattern better.

HTH,
Steve

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