Setting up a wireless mesh with multiple CBW240AC and 143 mesh devices

[robertmerritt22423]

Hi,

I read a similar posting regarding 240AC ap and meshing. My question is a bit broader. I have multiple 240AC access points spread over two floors of our church. In addition, I have multiple 143 mesh extenders distributed across both floors. The building itself is very WiFi unfriendly with lots of solid concrete and steel in walls and between floors. In most cases, you can consider each floor as an isolated building. All of 240AC devices are on a common wired network. The primary AP and 2 additional access points are on the main floor. 3 additional wired access points are on the second floor. The extenders on the main floor are all operational and show in the device/mac tables on the primary AP. Also, all of the wired APs show in this same table. None of the second floor extenders complete booting. They get to the point where the indicator is blinking red. If I relocate the extend to the first floor, it boots just fine so the primary AP has the correct MAC address setup. All of the APs are single wired network connected. It is cost prohibitive to add a second ethernet cable to create a wired mesh network between the APs; limited floor to floor access, lots of solid walls and ceilings in this building.

In reading the mesh design documents, I expected the second floor extenders to connect to one of the AP on that floor and that those APs would pass through the boot/setup traffic. Once boot was completed the second floor extenders would all join in a mesh using the various second floor APs and function there. By the boot issues, I am guessing that this setup won't work and the mesh is not being setup because the primary AP cannot directly connect to the extend second floor mesh.

If this is the case, I suspect I will need to migrate the second floor APs to use a different Vlan to enable a second primary AP setup to work, thus each floor is its own unique domain. Before doing all of the setup work, I wanted to verify my original design and its issues and confirm that the only economical solution is to split each floor into their own mesh. 

Thanks,

Bob

[Rich R]

It sounds like you know more about this than most of us as we mostly work with the Cisco Aironet/Catalyst APs.

But from what you've described your analysis sounds good - agreed that a separate VLAN sounds like the way to go for the 2nd floor.