A few recent blog posts have journaled my journey:
- Planning a high density outdoor wifi deployment
- Onprem versus cloud, aruba compared to Meraki
- WiFfi scarecrows
Well, last week saw the completion of the public side of Zoo Atlanta's WiFi. Today, every square inch of public space at our zoo has great WiFi signal and bandwidth. Come and enjoy it!
Next up will be to finish the behind the scenes areas where staff are located. We have some of those completed, and we should have the remainder done in the next few weeks.
What have I learned from putting in WiFi at a 40 acre urban zoo?
- I am not terribly allergic to bee stings, because the 30 or so stings that I got from disturbing yellow jackets didn't send me to the hospital. We eradicated that nest.
- I am allergic to poison ivy, as that's the only explanation for what happened to my calves; but I wasn't able to locate the patch to have it dealt with.
- Planning the placement of AP's by using the scarecrow method linked above was a tremendous help.
- PoE+ (802.3at type 2 at 30 watts) can be a challenge with switch configurations. There were a few tricks to getting the HP-2530 to deliver the proper power.
- Bamboo is murder on RF signal.
- Aruba handles "sticky clients" quite well. When you approach an access point at, let's say Elephants, your smartphone connects. All is good while you're there, but as you move away, you have much stronger signal from the AP at Pandas. Yet your phone (iPhone seems to be the worst) seems to suffer from separation anxiety, and holds onto the Elephants AP much longer than it should. Aruba does a thing they call "client match" which seems to force the switch to the better AP much more quickly.
- In monitoring usage, Apple iOS devices account for about half the traffic. But each week, I see Android creep up:
- Monitoring also reveals that Facebook is still a top site; Instagram, twitter and the other usual suspects aren't routinely in our top 20. But Amazon Cloud Drive is! Pandora and youtube are also getting some good traffic. I should probably block Netflix, but so far I am keeping things open.
And so now that the infrastructure is there, it's time to turn our attention to app development. What would you like to see in a zoo app? Post a comment here or email me at steve@ciodojo.com