Covering a medium auditorium

[dragos_dimitriu]

Hi all,

I was wondering if you have any suggestions / "best practices" for the following situation :

We have to cover a medium dimension auditorium , 12.000 sf (~1200 squared meters) , serving around 500 clients (at peek , mobile phones, notebook devices) . All walls are plasterboard, around 250 seats .

Due to client policies / budget we are restricted to R300 / R500 APs . A ZoneDirector 1200 will be serving this location and 2 smaller ones (2APs/location) 

What would be an optimal number both in terms of coverage and concurrent access.

Any thoughts are highly appreciated

[andrea_coppini]

Forget about the R3xx series. These are not designed for scale.

R500/R510 are your minimum. Ideally R610 or R710.
Calculate number of APs by dividing number of people by 75

[alexandra_frinc]

Hi Dragos,

For lecture halls/auditoriums we go with R710s.
For a similar size auditorium, we would use from 3 to 5 APs (we might disable some of 2.4GHz radios).

You should also consider the type of applications/ traffic that the clients will use: web browsing/ e-mail or also video etc..

I wouldn't worry about the coverage, but more about the capacity.

You could use Andrew von Nagy's capacity planning tool http://www.revolutionwifi.net/capacity-planner in order to estimate the number of APs needed.