Let's Ginger-Fi it!

We have over 130 buildings across our campuses. A lot of them have never had their wireless design assessed and updated (yet haha). A few weeks ago, someone reached out from a building we had never received a complaint from and I was very surprised at what I found.

The majority of staff in the building have a hardwired PC so this explained why this was our first complaint from. It is a large, four-story stone building with many classrooms, lecture theatres and offices. It was someone from one of these offices that put in a complaint about poor wireless coverage. When I checked our Airwave maps, it looked like they should have had good coverage. The building has an old, mostly hallway design consisting of 4 APs per floor but one of these was just outside his office. I figured maybe the wall material was causing the issue. It turned out that our airwave maps were not completely accurate. They were showing as ceiling mounted in the middle of the halls but turned out to be clock mounted high up on the wall with decorative arches every 10 feet down the hall blocking them from view.

After walking the whole building, it turned out that 15 out of the 16 APs were clock mounted. I believe this was done because, at the time the design was created, an aesthetically pleasing mounting option for the decorative metal ceiling was not available. Wireless would have also been an “add on” feature to our network at this time and hallway designs were often used for ease of access.

I used this new information to update our floorplans which created very different heatmaps. It also presented a good opportunity to take readings and see just how different a horizontal mounting vs a vertical mounting could be in a real life. Could adding a right angle wall mount cause significant enough of a change to the coverage?

I used our NetAlly Etherscope to take readings with the AirMapper app before we removed the AP and installed the new Ventev right-angle wall bracket. After uploading these reading and reconnecting the now L-mounted AP, I walked the same path again to get the new coverage map of the access point. The changes to the signal strength readings were very much worth the change 🙂

As you can see the difference to the 2.4GHz coverage was not very significant but the 5GHz has a 6dB change at the professor’s desk, which was the most important coverage point in this case.

I know clock mounting APs can cause a bit of a debate and there are definitely use cases for mounting the AP this way. This doesn’t mean I won’t be looking at doing a redesign of this building. Besides the placement of SOME of the APs, there are lecture theatres that should have dedicated access points, and a few other issues noticed while taking readings. But since this helped fix the wireless issues for this client, I’m happy with the results. I also enjoyed getting to use this as a bit of experiment in real world changes vs seeing it in a simulation 🙂