Cisco Wireless extender?

[brian.bushmaker]

Afternoon - 

We have a hospital with a nursing facility attached. The residents in those rooms often complain of poor wireless connectivity. We have about 6 cisco AP's that cover that area and works fine for nurses and staff, however, the signal strength drops deep into those rooms. Rather than dropping $1000 on additional AP's, does cisco provide/recommend any wireless extenders that could be purchased or is there a better 3rd party solution for this?

Thanks for you help!

[Leo Laohoo]

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@brian.bushmaker wrote:

We have about 6 cisco AP's that cover that area and works fine for nurses and staff,

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How are the APs deployed?  Are they all along the hallway?

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@brian.bushmaker wrote:

Rather than dropping $1000 on additional AP's, does cisco provide/recommend any wireless extenders that could be purchased or is there a better 3rd party solution for this?

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If there are no funds to properly deploy APs then do not bother.  Getting wireless "extenders" may extend the WiFi coverage but at the cost of halving the WiFi speed per every hop.  It is not worth it and can only generate more grief during troubleshooting time.

[Haydn Andrews · Accepted solution]

Agree with Leo.

Recommend a wireless survey be conducted to evaluate is it the RF coverage or something else. Might be able to achieve better coverage by relocating some APs.

Guessing APs are installed in the hallway - this leads to each AP hearing all the others really loud. With some manual channel planning and TX power levels you might be able to fix this by a config change as well.

Extenders are not recommended by Cisco.

[brian.bushmaker]

Appreciate everyone's feedback. Deploying the AP's in the hallways has been the standard, but it's likely time to change that thought process. Adjusting the power levels is also great starting point as well as contracting someone for a site survey.

Given the general consensus on the wireless extenders, I'll consider this case closed.

[Scott Fella]

You most likely need to drop money in order to provide the coverage users expect.  This sounds like a very old deployment where you have access points in the hallways.  That design does not work in environments today.  Like the others have stated, get a site survey.  I bet you have to place ap's in every other room or every third room depending on how old the construction is.