Planning a High Density, Outdoor WiFi Deployment - Seeing is Believing

In approaching adding WiFi to a 40 acre, heavily landscaped and rolling outdoor venue, I have had a number of experts suggest very expensive modeling exercises. Like the consultant who asks for your watch to tell you what time it is, these folks want building maps, topographical maps, satellite photos. They do a complex modeling job and come up with a "heat map" that indicates where you should place Access Points.

And that would be the right approach if there were no other choice. For example, if I was constructing the venue, or if I didn't have existing LAN drops within the 300' cable length limit of Ethernet.

But I do have these LAN connections, at least for the most part, and so the better approach was the empirical method. Vendors of enterprise gear, justifiably proud of their engineering accomplishment, are happy to give you evaluation units. And so I got a handful of access points from a variety of vendors. I bought lighting tripods, the kind you'd use on a stage. I bought some pre-terminated 300' CAT 6 ethernet cables.

And I built myself WiFi "scarecrows":

And voila, I no longer have to worry about how it works in theory, I can actually see it working in practice. This is incredibly easy with cloud based access points like Meraki or Aerohive. Aruba has an "instant" that is accessible. Ruckus would be harder with their controller approach, but if you can get an eval unit, then it's just a bit more effort.

So, get 4-6 scarecrows together and start to position them around. Test the mesh capabilities. Test the ease of configuring and monitoring. And get a very good, non-theoretical basis for where your production access points should be. Test with a wide variety of devices. Test under load. Test how well a brand releases "sticky clients" or practices air fairness. Test different antenna approaches (for me, I am trying to cover paths, so directional sectors appeared to be a better choice than omnis).

None of that would be achievable with the heat map model approach. And I had one vendor quote me $75K on that model alone! Doing it the scarecrow way, you can see how the actual, real world channel interference is, the impact of rain on foliage, and so forth.

And finally, when you have made your purchase decision and are performing the physical implementation, the scarecrow allows you to test out subtle differences in placement before everything gets screwed into place and cut to length.