Recommended Design for Wireless Network in a large institution?

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Hi,

let’s suppose I work in an institution with 25 buildings in different parts of a town, each building covered with ~50-70 AP’s and the number is gonna grow with 802.11ac @ 5 GHz.

What would be a recommended architecture now?

  1. Currently there are not so many concurrent users with high network traffic but I suspect this is going to grow in a near future. IMHO this would impose using more than one controller to prevent a bandwidth bottleneck, but is there any way to control the CAPsMANs themselves?
  2. What would be a hardware with sufficient computing power for such a controller? Would you follow a dedicated hardware or ESX’s?
  3. How would you PoE that many AP’s without creating a PoE mess?
2

Nobody experienced in sizing, scalability? :confused:

3

To be honest…are you sure that MikroTik is the way you want to go for such project ?

4

You must be joking, right?
I’ve been already running >200 AP for my indoor (eduroam on PEAP authentication) needs and it was pretty stable until ~6.2x. That’s why I’ve come up with topics like CAPsMAN Weeping and more specifically VLAN assignment based on RADIUS 802.1x reply after some meditation on UniFi or Mikrotik.

5

Crazy setup.but the key is to keep it simple.you will need a base station for every town so the town’s ap can connect to.okay thats obvious.then you will have to connect all the base stations to a central base station for management.this setup makes scalling and troubleshooting easy

6

Oh sorry, did I write that all buildings are already connected with a fibre?

What I am asking about is a recommended design of that indoor coverage in each building.

Imagine an IDF room full of passive PoE’s, overloaded CAPsMAN etc. … that’s what I am pointing at.

7

You can use 802.3af devices (like wAP), and PoE Switches. We use to install TP-Link SG2424P with no issues.

You could also use rackmount passive PoE. They’re like passive poe that comes with AP, and you’ll have 16 PoEs in 1U rackmount

For CAP Manager, you could install a centralized CCR, or even x86

Regards

8

Hi, thanks for your answer and thank MikroTik for 802.3… finally! But still,

  • where is 802.11ac ? It is 2015. wAP has still 100Mb connector and operates 2,4G only
  • my question also wanted to touch CAPsMAN scaling. How powerful hardware do I need for CAPsMAN to run 50 AP’s per building?
9

IMHO it depends also on how much traffic AP have to handle, on low traffic APs I control 10 cap with a simple RB750