Happy Monday, y'all.
We're currently planning a wireless refresh for our manufacturing and distribution plants. In general, environment is liquid foods manufacturing, refrigerated but not frozen. Our coolers have 30-40ft ceilings with ~30ft product racks, filled with palletized and packaged liquids (so pretty RF-bulletproof). Loading is done by SAP terminal-equipped forklifts.
When the SAP was first deployed, we've had some tremendous issues with forklift terminals maintaining connectivity; solution we finally settled down on was upgrading WAPs and deploying some heavier-duty external antennas with them. Current environment is mainly 1262s with various omni- or directional antennas.
The WAP we decided to use for replacement is Cisco 2802; however there's some pretty intense debate over internal VS external antenna solutions. Our Cisco rep is pretty aggressively stating 2802i WAPs will have "plenty of coverage and signal strength" and trying to steer my management from going with external antenna deployment options. My biggest concern is the difficulty of remedial action (read: replacing several hundred APs over a dozen production plants running 24/7 without causing massive production issues again), and I'm worried Cisco rep really doesn't understand the specific deployment environment in play here. My "ideal" solution would mirror what was implemented at our last 2 plants: AIR-AP2802e (2602e at those 2 plants) with AIR-ANT2544 antennas, which has proven to be providing rock-solid coverage.
So, the big question is: any firsthand or secondhand experiences with 2802i deployments in similar situations / environments? Or even just educated guesses?
Thanks!
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