Technical > Photos of Broadband gear > BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) set up in haste

BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) set up in haste

Yay Cisco

Very nice, thanks for sharing.

reply to netboy34
I'm rather curious as to what the controllers actually "do".

I've not dipped my feet into the whole BYOD business model so it's complete foreign territory.

What is their purpose in the BYOD domain?

reply to netboy34
Google is my friend.

Ahhh now I see. They manage the wireless infrastructure and allow for things such as seamless roaming etc.

Nice! I have something similar with our existing wireless infrastructure but we don't use Cisco.

If you are using WiFi handsets the seamless hand off is a must because Cisco IP Phones take for ever to reconnect if they jump from one AP to another.
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I do not, have not, and will not work for AT&T/Comcast/Verizon/Charter or similar sized company.

Doesnt WDS do that too?

Just wondering because I have a few sites with several autonomous APs tied together with WDS that allow roaming from AP-to-AP without having to re-authenticate/connect.

Im also using dynamic VLAN assignment using a single SSID. Not sure why Cisco docs dont show you how to do it with the stand alone APs because its not that difficult. They always show you using multiple SSIDs and that seems silly to me.

Very nice install though. Thanks for sharing.
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sk_buff what?

Open Source Network Accelerators
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reply to voxframe
In this case the 4 controllers are anchors for the 118 controllers out at the locations for one SSID. A client connects to the SSID, the connection gets routed up to these controllers, then the controllers connect to the server to serve the accept TOS page to the clients and keep track of who has accepted then relay DHCP. This segment is on its own IP range (Class B) separating it from the rest of the network (Class A) and is sent to the web filters before the internet.

Bleh classes. That terminology hasnt been used in ages. Get with the CIDR program.

How does the physical connection work? does it go AP-controller-switch? I can't tell if the purple cables go from each controller to the switch or....

reply to netboy34
Why do you have so many connections on each controller? Isn't just one connection require per controller?

Bandwidth!!!!!

reply to jeffmoss26
AP-> Controller onsite-> Fiber ring to the data center -> one of these controllers -> switch -> web filter -> internet

Each controller handles 7000 connections and has 24 controllers looking up to them.

Each controller has 8 1Gb sfp's which connect into the switch.
on the right side of the switch is the connections to the DHCP/DNS/Web servers (2) and the load balancer to the web filters (2) the crossover is ACL'ed so that we can remote in to the servers and controllers.

We have 104k students. right now we are only looking at a portion since Elementary kids will most likely not have any devices. (and even most Middle school)

reply to netboy34
Ah. I just did a small 2504 controller set up. Just set up one connection w/vlans. It was only 6 ap's though in someones house. I'm getting tired of Cisco though, everything is about licenses with them now. Want this feature? That's another license, etc. Been testing out Adtran equipment and falling in love with it.

Indeed. However the reason is not knock off hardware. It's people buying base licensed hardware and then loading kitchen-sink images on it. Cisco previously had little power to police that. With today's universal images, it's handled by an expensive license key.

Exactly. In reality its just them now (finally) doing what they were always entitled to do anyway, but probably just didnt have the means.

We're scraping the bottom of the gravy pot now.

reply to netboy34
Can someone, perhaps more intelligent than I, lay out the real need to spend $x000.00 on wireless controllers?

Other than creating a new single point of failure, and more easily being able to change the SSID, encryption type/key, or VLANs in one place - what is this controller really going to do for me that I can't program myself with autonomous APs?

cut down on administration and quality of connection... when you have an organization with thousands of access points, the controller helps. It also saves money in the long run.

for nice round numbers but using cisco....
(avg price from froogle since cisco is usually contract based and the more you buy the cheaper it becomes)

Aironet 1142 standalone

100 AP's that are autonomous x $600 = $60000 + administration time (say you pay $25/hr and it takes 5 hours to make a change in all AP's) so a total of $60125 if you only make one change

Airornet 1142 Controller based

100 AP's that are "dumb" x $400 = $40000 + controller (avg $1600) = $41600 (using the same $25/hr and it takes 10 minutes to make a change since it is centralized) so a total of $41604.20

By going with a controller based AP solution, you just saved $18520.80 the amount you save goes up the more AP's you have.

Now some variables are the AP count licensing per controller, in this instance I use a controller that has licensing for 100 AP's

Disclaimer: These are estimated numbers, I do not have real world numbers as it may be different for each person. Since who I work for buys a lot of cisco, our contract price is lower than retail.

I recommend you get a configuration management system and change all 100 APs in about 60 seconds.

I do get what your saying though and if we had more than 10 APs I *might* be pushing to go the controller route too. Your example assumes you buy Cisco stuff new too right?

We have the management system (actually about to upgrade it here sooner or later... WCS maybe? I'm just in the Data Center, so I'm not always in the loop for other things)

and the example is new stuff... I was just going for simplicity for the anon...