Best solution for campus-wide WiFi (Ubiquiti)?

[thecomputerguy]

I have a church that wants to extend their WiFi for connectivity across the entire campus. There are roughly 5 or 6 buildings all spread out pretty far. They do have a single line run from the main office to the youth center where there is an AP but the rest of the property is dead. I've used and I am comfortable with Ubiquiti equipment but never on this scale. You can tell how large the property is by the parking spots.

They had a 3rd party come out and sell them the "end all be all" and he installed an antenna in the middle of the property telling them it would reach everywhere and it's never worked. I don't even know what he did.

Their main office is Verizon FiOS and works perfectly ... all of the computers/printers in there are wired (5 computers/2 printers) and I was able to get the wireless "good enough" in there with just a basic AP.

Can anyone share some insight here?

It's been a long time since I studied ethernet ... can you even run it that far? does it have to be boosted? Are there line of sight options?

 

[Markverhyden]

Hopefully @YeOldeStonecat will drop in. From memory he's done several large campuses.

I'm guessing money is an issue so it's very important to do some type of heat map. A very simple way is to use one AP of the model you'd like to use. Such as a UniFi AC AP Pro or LR. You also want to get an idea of the number of users.

To do the survey setup the AP, which ever one you want to use, to enable DHCP so you can get an IP address from it. Then you want to walk the site with the AP, it's power supply, and your laptop. Many people use a cart with a UPS to power the AP as well as an extension cord to plug it in occasionally. You can do an eyeball survey to determine AP placement. Move the cart to the first potential spot. Connect you laptop to it then walk around noting the wireless signal amplitude using something like inSSIDer. You can also run ping to look at the latency. Log these values to a plan view of the site with the AP location and laptop location and measurements. Gives you an idea of the weak spots.

That all being said I've done plenty of larger scale AP installs at schools. Not a single one had performed a heat map. They just saturated the site with 1 AP in each room where people were.

The important thing to remember is that having copper runs to each AP is important to maintain a great QoS.

 

[TAPtech]

At first glance I would say you need an electrician to pull a home run into each of those buildings, and put an AP in each one of them.

 

[thecomputerguy]

At first glance I would say you need an electrician to pull a home run into each of those buildings, and put an AP in each one of them.

It looks like the longest Cat6 run I could do would be 100 meters or 328ft ... would that mean if I had to go farther than that I'd need to have the wiring guy cut the cable and put an ethernet booster midway?

 

[mdownes]

It looks like the longest Cat6 run I could do would be 100 meters or 328ft ... would that mean if I had to go farther than that I'd need to have the wiring guy cut the cable and put an ethernet booster midway?

For longer runs, I’d look into fibre rather than interrupting a CAT6 run.

 

[TAPtech]

I don't have experience with long runs. A switch works as a booster though, so you could just use a centrally located POE switch in the design.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Doesn't look bad at all....almost like one large building just broken up into sections.

I'm assuming you can get ethernet throughout the building.
As you noted..100 meters is the max length standard. If you need to get ethernet 300 meters...you either do fiber, or you can combine 3x 100 meter runs, with a switch in between to "boost" it. On a building like this, we'd likely have a couple of small network distros spread around, each with a home run back to the main office. Say a 24 or 48 big Unifi POE switch at the main office, and a few 8 or 16 port Unifi POE switchs around the rest of the campus....with longer runs continuing from them.

What's your time line on this? I'm happy to help, but I'm out of town for a little bit catching some warmth.
Can you edit that picture and overlay what they have for existing ethernet runs?

What I'd start considering is running 8 or 10 or 12 or so ethernet runs evenly spread out around the buildingS....and spread out WiFi from those.

We have to sketch in some construction to get an idea of what's under the roofs. Some roofs may have wide open big rooms under them (where say...1 or 2 APs would suffice), other roofs may have a bunch of small rooms compartmentalized by cinder block walls..such as a Sunday school building (so you may want an Eth run to each room and put an "in-wall AP" there.

 

[Markverhyden]

It looks like the longest Cat6 run I could do would be 100 meters or 328ft ... would that mean if I had to go farther than that I'd need to have the wiring guy cut the cable and put an ethernet booster midway?

The 100 hundred meter limit is kind of an arbitrary number so to speak. The ANSI/TIA spec lists 100 meters because if you purchase the proper cable and install according to SOP you will be guaranteed 1gb all day long. But Cat5e also does the same thing. To be honest you can probably reliably get 1gb at 450-500'. I did a 630' Cat5e that tested to 1gb. But if the customer specifies an ANSI/TIA spec you need to adhere to the length.

Pretty much any place I've seen around that size will not bother with doing fiber unless it's specified. Using the marked parking spaces as a metric and 9'/parking space width I get an outside dimension of the property of 306' x 198'. So even a convoluted copper run should be under 100 meters.

 

[mr m]

The 100 hundred meter limit is kind of an arbitrary number so to speak. The ANSI/TIA spec lists 100 meters because if you purchase the proper cable and install according to SOP you will be guaranteed 1gb all day long. But Cat5e also does the same thing. To be honest you can probably reliably get 1gb at 450-500'. I did a 630' Cat5e that tested to 1gb.

I once found a 660' Cat5 run connecting switches in two large warehouses. There were about 30 users in each location. The collisions were off the map. The worst performing network that I ever had the displeasure to work on.

Ethernet is all about timing. It takes a signal X amount of time to travel 328 feet. Longer runs screw up that timing. Each node listens before it broadcasts. If the line is quiet it sends out data packets. If it hears another station transmitting it waits and then attempts to resend the data. If the runs are longer than specified one node might hear silence while the other is transmitting and you get a collision so now everyone resets and tries again.

I have seen long (328+) copper runs work on small networks with little traffic but I would never install it myself. I would bet that 630' run had no other traffic on it when tested.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Thanks all for the replies ... @YeOldeStonecat do you mind if I drop you a couple PM's?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

No problem at all, happy to help, encourage posting what you can in the thread so others can learn too....helps out the forums. Happy to work via PMs or directly through email if you wish.

 

[Your PCMD]

I'm suprised that @YeOldeStonecat didn't mention a airMAX Omni and use some nanobeams's or locoM2's terminating to AC Pros.

I did this for a small community college here in my city not too long ago and they were elated. Granted it is a small campus

.

 

[fencepost]

Significantly exceeding the standard length on Ethernet can be a problem because of timing issues as much as due to signal propagation. You may get great propagation much further than the spec if you're using good cable, but all the equipment at each end is expecting response times based on the standard.

And as far as doing long runs with switches in between, just make sure that you're using managed switches and monitoring them - you don't want to be trying to figure out what's failed if an unmanaged PoE switch bites the dust somewhere. Much better to be able to check a dashboard and say "I'm not getting any responses from the 1West wiring closet equipment or anything past it."

 

[Markverhyden]

It looks like the longest Cat6 run I could do would be 100 meters or 328ft ... would that mean if I had to go farther than that I'd need to have the wiring guy cut the cable and put an ethernet booster midway?

Have you measured the site? Using parking spaces as a metric it looks like it's around 300' by 130' outside dimension.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Have you measured the site? Using parking spaces as a metric it looks like it's around 300' by 130' outside dimension.

I walked it today and turns out they don't care if they get wifi past a certain southern point. They do have 3 cat6 runs evenly spaced out on the North side of picture evenly spaced out between the office, the large building to the west of the office and a run in the youth center. I'm going to mount 3 Ubiquiti APs and power them locally and then he wants to see how far the signal will go only by saturating the north side with AP's. If it isn't enough we will have a wiring guy out to drop a few more runs toward the middle of the property. They dont care much about the south side. Paint explanation below. Think this will work?

 

[thecomputerguy]

I think ideally there would be another AP in the south side of the large building and then two more in the southern most buildings but they don't care about coverage that far.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I'm suprised that @YeOldeStonecat didn't mention a airMAX Omni and use some nanobeams's or locoM2's terminating to AC Pros..

I didn't even think P2P for a second..the OPs project is basically 1x big building with different roof tops (including tall peaks on the roofs since it's a church). Running ethernet indoors will cover the distance and be less costly than dealing with passing cable through roofs and grounding.

On a project like the one you put a picture up for..that's more of a true campus area network...your buildings are separate individual buildings, possible with underground conduit, or not. So a buncha P2Ps makes sense there. But the OPs is basically just 1x big building.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

So a rough plan of the layout of the walls will help. That room behind the main area of the church...I think it's called the Sacristy, and then how the interior walls are laid out in the area above your curved tan line designating area of coverage. Is this all single story, or is there a basement level and undercroft and other areas below to cover? Hopefully at least a basement for utilities where you can run an ethernet from the office area to the Sacristy and get another switch there to then spread out

Can you label what each area is? What is under the flat part of the roof? What's under that long pitched roof on the left? I'd want to see plans showing walls, and see what type of walls are there. Gotta factor in things like walls, what's they're made of, stuff like that when figuring out the spacing of the APs.

It's best to plan on more APs..closer together, on low TX power, versus trying to do it with as few APs as possible.