nanog mailing list archives
Re: Xirrus Wireless
From: Pete Carah <pete () altadena net>
Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2012 15:32:15 -0700
On 03/13/2012 02:34 PM, Blake Pfankuch wrote:
I know this is a little outside of the traditional NANOG realm but... I have a customer looking at a fair number of Xirrus Wireless Arrays for 802.11a/b/g/n implementations and am looking for some real world insight into them. On the cover they look cool, the white papers look cool, but I am yet to find technical commentary from a real person on these devices. Looking at the XN line, and just curious if anyone has deployed these, supports these or knows anything about them.
I can only speak from indirect experience; the rehab place where my wife is staying for a bit uses 4 or 5 of them (older, probably not current, flying-saucer-like boxes suspended from the ceiling at hallway junctions) and there, at least, they appear to work pretty well. The particular ones don't appear to my laptop to do 11a. However, I don't think there is any significant user density just from watching the nifty directional light display, so this may not mean much (I'd guess 3 to 10 users over the whole building including smartphones and a couple of pieces of medical equipment that isn't used much). Also there is no IT (or any real technical maint) guy on-premises to talk to so I can't ask about any other aspect. The local real hospital uses a Cisco system (or at least Cisco APs; don't know about the AP manager box) which really does appear to work well; I'd guess several hundred APs with lots of full-time medical gear, and a "guest" network which is behind a rather draconian firewall (wouldn't let me ssh out to a non-standard port (65k range), for example; I had to fix myself a 443 ssh port for the time we spent there a couple of months ago... Blocked 25 outgoing; I don't blame them for that, however they also blocked 465 (but allowed 587)). I suspect if I wanted 2.4-only I'd go with ubiquiti, but I don't have any experience with them, and their "unifi" boxes don't (yet) come in 5gig. And they don't appear to have independent APs in each box, though I don't know how well the "directional" antennas in the Xirrus actually separate things; even a 100mw transmitter may well overwhelm all the other local receivers unless there is a bunch of shielding inside the enclosure (and maybe even then...) If 802.11 was frequency-split like the cell system it would help such systems a bunch. -- Pete
Thanks! Blake
Current thread:
- Xirrus Wireless Blake Pfankuch (Mar 13)
- Re: Xirrus Wireless Pete Carah (Mar 13)
- Message not available
- Re: Xirrus Wireless Pete Carah (Mar 13)
- RE: Xirrus Wireless Blake Pfankuch (Mar 13)
- Re: Xirrus Wireless Michael Painter (Mar 13)
- Message not available
- Re: Xirrus Wireless Pete Carah (Mar 13)