WVoIP Site survey

[spiderbite]

I wanted to get a concensus regarding Site surveying a VoIP project.

My plan is to survey for the phone being the lowest denominator of the equation. I hear the radio sensitivity is pretty bad on the spectralink phones compared to a Cisco client card.

I also understand that the phones try to drop to 5.5 pretty quick in terms of distance from a viable 11Mbps AP.

In order to maintain an 11Mb link I would assume I need lots of overlap (50%)???


Any thoughts are welcome. I cant reveal much more because this is too high profile for my concerns. I could get in trouble.

However, there will be a caveat that only a single digit number of active calls will be supported only!!!

So I need to take this into consideration.



Any war stories or anecdotal evidence of a working environment with less than 250 phones would be appreiciated.


Thanks...

[oshea85]

check with spectralink's tech support for info, but if I were you, I'd try to get a phone to survey with.

[spiderbite]

I did and I am. On paper it looks pretty bleak, but tommorrow is the big day......we'll see.

[ilovebacon]

Spiderbite,

First of all I need to state that I work for Meru Networks. I am responding to this message because VOIP over WiFi is one of our core competancies and an area where we have much real world experience.

Surveying a site for VOIP is a tricky problem. You want to maintain consistent coverage for voice users, and prevent data users from stepping on the packet rates required by the particular codec you are deploying.

So, your design will likely tend toward one with a lot of APs with reduced power levels, however this does not address the interference caused by client devices that can see multiple APs at the same time.

Many manufacturers will recommend that you dedicate one channel for Voice-only usage, yet this creates further issues with the data part of the network since now you only have 2 channels to play with.

Now that I've stated the obvious, a brief pitch -->

Our solution addresses all these issues by allowing you to deploy seamless 802.11 coverage that is qpplication aware and can allocate bi-directional QoS resources over the air. Our APs have flow detectors embeded that can recognize SIP (for example) and provision per-codec QoS policies.

We have several customers runnig spectralink products and they are extremely happy with the implementations compared to their previous architectures.

Sorry for the advertisement folks. I hope it helped more people than it offended.

Any questions feel free to contact me
Ttom