Wi-Fi configurations for hotel and Apartments

[mojazz]

I need a suggestion for a wireless config for a 3 floor hotel with long hallways with an open court in the center of the rectangle. This is an older building with a fair amount of brick.

[ahuebel]

well, before we go too far, you need to be more definitive. How long is long? Have you done a site survey yet and scanned for other RF activity? What type of traffic will be supported on this WLAN? Do you own this building or is someone asking you to do this?

[mojazz]

Good points. 1. Long is about 150 feet. Each floor has 2 parallel hallways with no interconnection between. There are inside rooms and outside rooms on each hallway. The inside rooms face the open center courtyard. The outside rooms face the streets or adjacent buildings.

2) I have not done a formal survey as yet. I am aware of other wi-fi signals penterating this location by using a sniffer. But this was very informal. I am planning to use the Rangelan2 product or the other free software mentioned in the site survey thread in this forum. This will be my first time working at this large of a scale.

3) I do not own the building. I know the owner and have been asked if I could do this.

4) In theory we would like to limmit the cost to $1000.00 per floor.

5) We anticipate a maximum of 30 users at any one time.

Thank you so much.

[ahuebel]

Hmmm, do I get a consulting fee :).
WAPs can usually cover approximately 130'. You have a few things to consider however if you want to get coverage in each room. Namely, penetrating the walls/doors. Depending on the composition of the walls and doors, it may be difficult. Only a site survey will tell you accurately. My initial thoughts are that 3 WAPs should be able to cover each floor. The cost of the APs alone could exceed 1000 per floor, but if you are in a crunch, perhaps SOHO equipment may work. Again, a site survey is what you need to do. At any rate, do you already have a backhaul infrastructure (i.e. cat 5 or fiber running to a main teleco closet etc)? If not, $1000 per floor will be very difficult to acheive (unless you want to pull some wires for free!) Again, your first step really needs to be a site survey....(did I mention that already?) :). Good Luck!

[rigbyorange]

Hello,
You might want to look into a meshed network deployment. There are a few companies out there.

[lwheeler]

I just finished a similar survey for major hotel, over a 1000 rooms total, hallways, towers and an atrium. Using the Cisco 350 with standard 2.2dBi omni antennas and 100mW power, for the hallways, I was able to cover 3 floors, curent floor, one below and one above. Each room was capable of at least 1MB transfer speeds. I used directional patch antennas for the unique atrium room coverage. Of course every hotel is differnet in structural make-up and design, but I must say I was surprised I could get such excellant coverage in an all brick, multiple floor environment. Make sure not to over-subscribe the AP user count by to much. 25-30 people using an AP concurrently is going to make some people awfully mad. The good thing is, if it is complementary, they can't really complain. But if they pay for it, that's another story.
Larry

[ahuebel]

You definately need to limit the user count to less than 25 per AP. 1 AP for 3 floors seems to be stretching it pretty thin to me, but if the building can work with it, that is pretty good.

[lwheeler]

In the tower design, I only needed 1 AP for 3 floors. Example: AP is located on the second floor, covers floor 1 and 3 as well. The next AP went on floor 5, covers floor 4 and 6 as well. The user count in the tower was low, 10 per floor. So now I have worst case scenairo of 30 users online at once. The chances of that are relativly low. In the other parts of the hotel the hallways were longer and had 20 users per floor. I still got 3 floor coverage per AP, but here I used 2 AP's per floor. No way could I allow a potential of 60 people accessing a single AP, or even 40. I performed an intense site-survey, no guessing involved here. I used a fluke waverunner, for the survey analysis. Inspected 80% of the rooms, far and near for specific signal and SNR. Changed the wireless environment, opening and closing specific doors, etc. I setup multiple devices, handhelds and laptops. I transferred, via FTP, files back and forth from various devices and various rooms.
Larry

[mojazz]

Wow!! All, thank you for this great information and suggestions. I will follow up on all of these points starting with doing a proper site survey.

The hotel owner is willing to provide the cable pulling labor. That is one bit of good news.

Afterwards I hope to be able to contribute to this outstanding community in some small way.

Thank you.

[ahuebel]

You are quite welcome. I for one, dont mind monetary contributions. :). Again, good luck!

[lwheeler]

Good man! Let's all say it together now "A site-survey is our friend" :D
Larry

[bjsky]

Your hotel builded by brick,Its a good condition.
The Wi-Fi's signal can through the wall, so you may not need a AP.

[jflynn]

Having previously been employed by MobileStar Network (we were purchased by T-Mobile), seeing many hotels installed with WLAN and personally being the guy flown out to repair bad relationships caused by installs gone wrong I can offer some warnings:

- hotel mgt and owners are very meticulous and picky
- they will expect perfection (100% coverage) unless you set appropriate expectations
- site survey before, during and after install is crucial due to unusual construction in hotels (chickenwire, re-bar, thick concrete, foil-backed wallpaper)
- unless you're a moonlighter starting out you're not charging nearly enough since I guarantee this guy will want warranty work and training and hand-holding
- tell him security is 100% his users' responsibility
- tell him you do not guarantee sufficient bandwidth for videoconferencing, better yet don't even mention the evil VC term (trust me)
- small and indie hospitality organizations are notoriously cheap
- if his ISP goes down he'll call you
- if a mouse farts he'll call you
- if you deliver a great solution and service he'll be the best referral source you ever had

Good luck, son! I personally think you're crazy to not sell the cable pulls, that's nearly pure profit. Learn how to work a fish tape or how to negotiate subcontractors.

I think you're dreaming to have 30 users at at time, let alone per AP. You *might* get 30 total users a month, maybe.

[mojazz]

Jflynn, after taking another site visit to plan out my site survey and talk with the management. I can truely say that your words are GOLDEN.

Taking some of the feed back and looking at the situation in the cold light of real facts I set the expectation that the price,$1000.00 per floor, that they would like to operate under was too low.

The deal is not dead, but the cheap side of them reared its ugly head. I do want to find a way to make this work because it is a great learning exeperience.

At 30 connections a month the only way to make any money is to charge a management fee. Can not make any money off of usage.

Thanks.

[a13088]

Wireless coverage for hotel guest room is a very difficult task. Good wireless signal is very difficult to penetrate into guest room from corridor due to the serious shielding problem of the washroom located inside each room entrance.

For good hotels, they have very good building materials and decoration for the washroom and the shielding effect is more serious.

We had the bad experince in preparing wlan project for Beijing St.Regis and finally gave up the project because of this problem.