I'm in the process of onboarding a larger customer, and they have some really complex network requirements as far as scalability goes. They are a condo building, and for now just want network access for the management company/ HOA that is condensed to a few floors. There will still be guest access for the residents, but that will be limited and will only be supported on those floors. The kicker is at some point they may want wifi throughout the entire building, and that is over a thousand residents.
I'm thinking the best way to go about this and to stay within their budget is to start with a good core switch, and a lower end firewall and if at some point they want to provide that kind of service to their residents we can address it at a later point. Usually for smaller businesses I go with ubiquiti or Juniper, however based on some research I've been doing I think Fortinet would be a good choice for the firewall.
For the switch I was thinking about starting with one Juniper EX4300 in the wiring closet and putting Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch 24 port switches with POE on all of the floors that need access. If they decide to do whole building wifi later on, I think it would make sense to get a second EX4300 and place it either on the top floor or in the middle of the building. At that point I would want to put EX3400s or maybe even just EX2300s on all of the floors and have them connected to one of the 4300s. This would be necessary because there is limited conduit space.
The building is a concrete shell and has thick interior walls, so each floor would have around 8 access points. I know doing a network like this sounds unreasonable, but the isp charges individual residents a fortune and has a monopoly in this area. They already provide a TV antenna that all of the residents have wired into their units, so it would make cord cutting easy for most people.
What do you guys think about this plan? I think it would work, and it would come in under budget and would make it fairly easy to grow if there is a need later on.
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