Outdoor AP recommendation

[patoberli]

Hi all

This is the situation:

I currently think about providing some outdoor Wi-Fi coverage to our users. The grey parts are our buildings, green is grass and blue is lake.

I probably can mount APs on the outside of our grey buildings. Most important area to be covered would be the middle green part, but wouldn't mind to also have the lower left covered. That's some 50 meters from the building.

What do you think, can I solve this with 1-2 AIR-AP1562D-x-K9 or AIR-AP1562I-x-K9? The coverage doesn't need to be great, but good enough for surfing the web. Also, the buildings already have a fairly dense Wi-Fi network deployed on the inside, I'd prefer to not disturb that one to much, but the building has metal vapor windows and is otherwise a steel construction.

[RichardAtkin]

Best thing you can do is to get a local specialist WiFi company down and get them to do a survey - there's loads of ways you could approach this, but you'll only know which is best once you get on site as factors like the height of buildings, availability of power / data, density of Users, competing networks (etc etc) will all have an impact.

For outdoor stuff, if you're insistent in going off plan, google / bing maps are often better than an illustration, but I'd do a proper survey if I were you.

[patoberli]

That was an openstreetmap Map, which is the same as google maps, just more precise. There won't be any competing networks, as there is just a lake in front of our buildings :)

[RichardAtkin · Accepted solution]

Google maps / Streetview shows building materials, building heights, tree heights, signage locations, etc... there's no end of things that can impact where / how you mount an Access Point.
On the scheme of how to plan an outdoor Wireless network...
- Planning off a 2D plan - very, very bad
- Planning off a 3D Google Maps / StreetView - slightly less bad, but still pretty bad
....
- Proper on site survey with real people and real eyes and active survey equipment - ideal

[patoberli]

Thanks, I guess I'll go the site survey route.