Wireless design advice

brad_dsg
New here

Wireless design advice

Hi All

 

We have three buildings at a site, all very close to each other, and currently, they have a Meraki network in each. So this means separate LANs, wireless, etc.

 

I'd like instead for the three buildings to just act as a campus and for example, all the APs in each building serve the same networks and the APs just worth together to handoff clients as they move between buildings etc.

 

So, my questions to you fine people are:

 

1) is this a good idea in terms of best practice

2) if so, what is the best way to achieve it?

 

It's frustrating having to join different SSIDs and whatnot if we could just combine the power of all kit.

 

We are talking probably 200 clients max.

 

Thanks in advance

6 REPLIES 6
Tim_Patrick_ADS
Here to help

 

When you talk about clients roaming between buildings with a hand off are you referring to keeping an active session like a voice call up and running or do you mean the users having to re-authenticate through something like captive portal?

 

If your talking about a voice call staying up assuming you have sufficient coverage between the buildings you likely want to look at features like Layer 3 roaming or Layer 3 roaming with a concentrator in the SSID configuration. 

 

If your talking about not having the users re-authenticate to the captive portal every time they go to a new Network this may be achievable if you move all of the AP's to a single Network container though I had mixed results with this. We choose to deploy a Radius server tied to our PKI infrastructure so clients can roam between facilities with out being prompted to login at each site via the Meraki captive portal.

Thanks for the reply Tim.

 

It's more users having to reauthenticate onto the different network. They'd have the networks saved in their profiles but sometimes it can just barely pick up the signal of the other and you have to disconnect, then connect to the network of the building you're in.

 

But now you mention it yes, being able to keep voice calls up etc sounds like a very nice to have.

 

L3 roaming/concentration sounds interesting!

 

We don't have a captive portal, it's just direct connection.

 

Thanks again for the reply!

ww
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

I would just stretch the main building vlans to the other building. With 200 devices this  should not be a issue.   And use for example 2 ssids/vlans one for data one for voice

BlakeRichardson
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

@brad_dsg  Seems like a good idea to me, in the end it will give you potentially less SSID to manage and hopefully seemless roaming for the client deivce which makes them happy.

 

 

What is the Tx power of the APs? If they are failing to roam maybe it's because they see too strong of a signal from the distant AP.

ArshadSafrulla
Here to help

If you have geo-separation based networks in your organization only way is Layer 3 concentrator. But there are very well known bugs which causes packet drops in this mode.

Rather I would recommend bring all of your AP's to one single network under your organization, and use Bridge mode. Only in cases where there is a coverage hole when roaming client will have to go through the whole auth process again, otherwise it will be a seamless roam. 

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