Switch – Building new network and need 200+ wireless devices

best practicesrouterswitchwireless

I'm planning the network for my company's new office space. I'm not an expert so I'd like to present my plan and ask y'all nice folk to tell me if and where I'm making mistakes.

Assumptions:

  • Office is 300 sq meters on a single floor with mostly drywall walls.
  • We currently have 18 workers.
  • Due to expected growth, the office should support 50 workstations people comfortably.
  • We are a mobile app company so between our dev team and our testers we need wireless support for 200+ devices mostly smart phones.
  • Most of our traffic is to and from the internet rather than internal
  • Need multiple wireless networks (internal & guest at minimum)
  • No on site servers (other than developers running some locally for dev & testing).
  • All code, documentation, production servers, etc is cloud. (We use Dropbox for backup, Atlassian for JIRA & confluence, BitBucket for repos, S3 for servers, etc)
  • The ISP can provide 30MBps d/l and either 2 or 4 u/l
  • workstations are all Apple (network cards all 10/100/1000)

My current plan:

  1. 2 LAN drops per workstation, CAT5e wiring to a patch panel, should be around 100 terminations.
  2. Modem – Cisco 887. This is included in the ISP's package.
  3. Router / Firewall – Soekris 6501 running pfSense (http://soekris.com/products/net6501.html)
  4. Switch (wired) – HP 2510-48G, L2 fully managed, Gigabit. I'll start with one and only hook up the workstations in use. If I need more, I can add more.
  5. Wireless controller with a few wireless access points.
  6. Set up all LANs on the router.
  7. Trunk the wired switch to the router and use the wired switch as a dumb switch
  8. Connect the wireless controller to the router so it is physically separate from the main LAN.
  9. Set up 2 wireless networks with wireless authentication with WPA2

Questions:

  1. For the Soekris, there are a bunch of options (RAM, CPU). Can I go
    with the basic or do I need to get the high end options?
  2. For the wireless setup, I don't fully understand the differences between and when to use a wireless controller and a wireless access point. Do I need both, one, none? I've spent a lot of hours reading and talking to folks and I still don't know what to get.
  3. My best guess for the above question is to get either the either the Cisco CT-2504-5 wireless controller or Netgear ProSafe 16-AP Wireless Management System along with either the Cisco or Netgear access points. Both controllers are around $1000 and seem to do the same stuff. Are there important diferences?
  4. As to the Access points, I'm also confused. Netgear has WNDAP350 and WNDAP360. Again, I can't understand the difference here.
  5. Do I really gain by trunking the switch to the router?
  6. Am I going overboard here? Did I plan a backhoe when all I need is a spade?

Best Answer

A couple of thoughts. I can go into more detail on any of these if you need me to.

-When it comes to wireless, there are two ways to plan. One is for coverage, the other is for capacity. Based on the number of devices(capacity) and space(coverage) that you describe, I believe that capacity is going to the be the bigger deciding factor. Remember that wireless is like using an old-school hub. Everyone hears everything. That also means that only one client can talk to one AP at a time. This isn't a limitation of a device (Cisco vs. Netgear) this is a limitation of the physical medium (airspace). Since you are programming for mobile devices, which will only support a single stream, you should plan on 1 dual band AP per 50 devices. If you choose to only support 2.4 or 5Ghz (airspace issues with neighbor offices for instance), then plan on 1 AP per 30 devices.

-The Cisco 887 only has a 100Mb connection. If you keep with your current plan, and do all of your L3 routing on the 887, it will become a bottleneck for anything that routes between your internal networks. Examples include: Local replication for Dropbox, Wireless synching between i-devices and itunes, Copying files from machine A to B, Time machine backups, etc. etc. This bottleneck occurs because anytime data must flow from one network to another (wlan to lan) it will need to be routed, and must go out, and then back in, from the same 100Mb interface. This might not be a big deal, but I wanted to mention it, just-in-case.

-The Wireless controllers are a good idea. The initial setup takes a little while longer, but from that point on, it becomes super easy to deploy more AP's or WLAN's. I don't know anything about them from personal experience, but I have heard good things about the Meraki AP's. It is an cloud-based controller solution, which Cisco recently bought. EDIT for clarity: I don't know anything about the Meraki solution. I know A LOT about the Cisco Wireless Controllers :-).

-How are you powering your AP's? Do you plan on using VOIP in the future? Consider both of these when considering whether or not to order a switch with PoE.

-Also, just noticed, you are planning on putting a firewall in-line after the router. That further complicates your plan to route between subnets there. I would plan on purchasing an L3 switch. That would simplify the deployment considerably.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

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