Wednesday, February 3, 2021

Alternatives to Mobility IP (without cisco)

Hi All,

Currently looking at refreshing WiFi/switches for a densely packed school. Looks like we will have several hundred wireless devices in each building and as many as 800 in the main building (3 floors 150 classrooms + communal) at any one time.

Due to the asinine way that the original contractors fitted the building roughly a third of the building is covered by each of the patch rooms and instead of dividing that up by floor (or other logical area) they are at opposite ends of the building and they overlap. Therefore we have access points on multiple floors from the same patch room and neighbouring classrooms (in a few cases the same classroom) can go back to different patch rooms. Right now that isn't a problem because we have about 100 wireless devices so they are all on the same VLAN/subnet.

Roll on next academic year we are looking at students having a tablet each. I'm worried about broadcast traffic from everywhere to everywhere if the VLANs were to be set up in the same way - in total we would probably have roughly 10 VLANs competing for air time across the entire campus. Between buildings there is an air gap so at least the satellite buildings can have a different subnet but in the main building as I say kids could literally walk from room to room and have connection issues for the duration of time it will take to re-issue the new IP - although less of a problem I also imagine if I left the APs to their own thing that I would get tablets hopping between APs constantly (will deal with that later).

So /r/networking does anyone have any suggestions that doesn't involve bankrupting the school to buy cisco APs and/or switches?

Thanks!



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