1. When we moved into our new building this past year the data/cabling vendor just mounted our Meraki APs willy nilly and some of them are in less than desirable spots (photos for reference). Some of them are mounted into our concrete ceilings. A project this year for me will be to go around and relocate those APs to areas where they achieve better signal propagation. It won't be easy because I have to deal with the concrete but, I'm confident I can do it 🙂   2. Become a CWNA   3. Dig in more on RF characteristics and math to make troubleshooting wireless networks easier (hopefully)         ... View more

For this deployment the key things I focused on were: High density environment Room sizes that can change 600 max participant limit Availability of metrics to conference staff as well as clients   I designed the venue using an even layout of 16 Meraki MR52 APs being fed from a Meraki MS120-24 switch being fed from a Meraki MX250 security device. These devices were chosen because of their compatibility with each other and because they serve the perceived capacity requirements of the venue.   Most Meraki APs can serve a theoretical max of 128 clients (per Meraki documentation here: https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/WiFi_Basics_and_Best_Practices/Approximating_Maximum_Clients_per_Access_Point) but, for design purposes  I prefer to keep the equipment specified for double the peak utilization to preserve performance and provide excess capacity in case of failures.  Working from the number of 600 participants and having done wireless administration for some time, you realize that most participants typically bring two devices with them (laptop, mobile). Some bring 3-4 (tablets, watches, etc)! So a more realistic capacity number would be 1200 devices. Since I wanted to keep the design a little simpler (too many more APs and we’d have to add an extra switch for power requirements). I went with 16 of the MR52 APs (and I chose MR52 because those are designed with high density in mind) and they can all be powered off one MS120-24 switch from Meraki. I should make a small mention about doubling the security gateway and switch for redundancy purposes but, felt that might be beyond the scope of this scenario.   The MX250 security device was chosen as the gateway/router/etc because it has a capability to handle up to 2000 clients and 4Gbps of bandwidth. This fits our capacity requirements without going overboard or under designing (MX100 only recommends 500 clients and the MX450 is overkill with 10,000 clients).   The MX250 also allows the use of traffic shaping which would be a critical component to cover the requirement of keeping up the performance of business-critical applications. I would create 2 separate WiFi SSIDs for the venue, one for onsite venue staff/management and one guest network for attendees and vendors. For the guest network, I would setup a click-through splash page just so the venue can have a way for users to agree to a TOS. On the guest network, I would setup traffic shaping so that there was a per-client limitation of 5Mbps and a Per-SSID limitation of 475Mbps. This would reserve at least 25Mbps for the venue staff/management SSID. Depending on the needs of the business critical applications, adjustments to those numbers could be made.   As for the configuration of the APs themselves, I would likely create an RF profile for the site and then set Band Selection to Per AP and I would turn off band steering. I know vendors  promote  band  steering but  my experience shows  that most of the time it  fails to meet expectations and sometimes actually inhibits devices from connecting. I would set minimum bitrate per SSID and set a fairly high minimum bitrate (18Mbps) to encourage devices to switch to their nearest APs quickly. I would also set client balancing to ON since this will be a high density environment and there is the possibility to overwhelm a particular AP with client connections without this feature enabled. Channel width would depend on the location for me but, I would likely set the channel widths to 20MHz for the 5GHz band so that RF could be reduced with a higher selection of available channels (DFS decisions would be made dependent on location proximity to an airport). I would also set radio power to automatic. As the rooms can change sizes and devices could be anywhere within the venue, radio signal strength needs to be automatically adjustable by the system to compensate for the room changes and device locations. There should also be discussions held with the venue management about disabling the 2.4GHz band if there are no devices that need it in an effort to reduce RF interference for the bluetooth devices that attendees are likely to have with them.   For the metrics in this scenario, I would say a combination of a the Location Analytics report and the Organization Wireless Summary Report would give all the performance and details of attendance and engagement that would be desired. These could be piped out to a web page through the Meraki API or the summary report could also be emailed on an event by event basis to whoever would need it.    ... View more