Planning for Wireless Network

If you're planning to deploy wireless access points in a networking project then I congrats you, you still have lots of works to be done before you get to configuring the access points .

There are lots of things to consider if you're in a networking project, the location of the access points, channels to use, are there radio interferences in the locations, etc.

You need to do wireless site survey in a network project, see they even created their own science for this work.

To talk about wireless site survey could take its own blogs, books, tools and even specialized certification if you want to do it properly and professionally.
The tools software and hardware don't come in cheap I'm telling you.

There are softwares that can do wireless site survey, they can visually show you the range of access points that are installed in the site. Few that I've seen in work before are from ekahau and visiwave.

On the top of this post is the sample report from visiwave and the left picture here is from ekahau.

These pictures show you the range of the wireless access points on site. They're kinda like heat meter or something. With these you can then determine the best placement for the access points that can reach all clients.

From my experience not all of these softwares work with your wireless cards, so keep in mind before purchasing these softwares, do they support your wireless cards or not.

There also hardwares that can help you do the site survey and these hardwares can also scan for radio interferences such as that come from oven microwave, cordless phones, etc.
You got to check on yellowjacket from bvssystem, these things are cool.

The people in bvssystem integrates HP iPaq PDA with their yellowjacket to be used as wireless site survey tool.
This one is in the form of Tablet PC for spectrum analysis:

Both softwares and hardwares can provide you with detailed reports of the wireless site survey result.

Now that's when you're working in a network project, if you want to deploy wireless access points in your home or SOHO, you don't need to do all that troubles.

Next post I want to talk about the things to consider if you want to install wireless access points in your home or SOHO.