Inside Interop Blog Gives Detail on Xirrus Arrays

I thought this was an awesome blog that Brian Chee posted about Xirrus. Funny thing was I posted something about Xirrus yesterday for being the Wi-Fi provider at Interop. I would like to share what Brian blogged about:

Back in the day, a network engineer commented that “…we sure had to run a lot of wire for wireless…” The gist being that we needed to put in a whole heck of a lot of wireless access points to support the loads found at a technology trade show. Now this is NOT to say that the InteropNET venue is by any means “normal”, because it isn’t. From the NOC we can typically see hundreds of access points with people stomping all over each other with their AP’s cranked up to full volume in a feeble attempt to drown out their neighbor. We also have one heck of a lot of territory to cover since our guests will find a quiet spot just about everywhere in the convention center. So our challenges for wireless are: (1) the need for LOTS of coverage, and (2) the need for intelligent coverage so that we don’t add to the “shouting match” between the hundreds of access points in the exhibit hall.

Our partners at Xirrus are back with their flying saucer WiFi arrays, hovering over the exhibit hall, and on tripods throughout the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. However, these flying saucers actually have up to sixteen radios in each saucer, with sectional antennas and patented signal guides to more intelligently direct the signal to where it’s needed instead of just blasting in a 360 degree circle. The end result for the InteropNET is a whole lot less wire run to support wireless and instead of a hundred or so access points, we’re talking about a dozen now.

These “sector” antennas are mounted along the rim of the saucer, each one covering a piece of the “pie” so to speak. With each radio being individually controllable, the Xirrus folks can “shape” the radio energy to better cover odd shaped areas. One of their favorite examples are schools and how they tend to have a high density of users in long narrow buildings.

These anonymous “heat maps” are actual measurements from various Xirrus customer schools….the funny thing is that warehouses also have heat maps that look like these but for a different reason. Your typical warehouse has long rows of metal shelves with stuff on them and the signal from traditional access points will bounce around like billiard balls causing all kinds of multipath interference. The Xirrus solution of shaping the RF energy patterns, greatly reduces multipathing allowing more throughput with less energy.

To get a better glimpse of the technology and Xirrus’ role in the InteropNET, I shot a little video of John Merrill at hotstage where he shows off the guts of an array.

Pros and Cons of Allowing All Comments In Blog

First, I would like to apologize in my lack of replies to all my comments received. During down time, I decided to look into my comments. I was actually surprised and happy to see that I have a lot of readers and comments! Maybe it’s because when I first started this blog, I had very little readers and little to no comments.

Anyways so on my preferences, I decided to allow readers to comment me and have their comments posted right away without having to pend for approval. I also decided to not require an email address. My reason for my decision is because I do not want it to be a pain for my readers. I like to put myself on the other side. Hell, I even catch myself sometimes not making comments on certain blogs because of that whole email requirement/pending approval thing. That’s the good thing of allowing all comments to be posted ASAP without and monitoring.

However, monitoring is also a good thing. By monitoring my comments, I can decline the random spam comments. I can also be notified when an interested party comments my blog. I have failed these past few weeks to reply to any comments because I did not pay attention. I would thus like to apologize for that.

So what’s the outcome? I still want to allow my readers to post comments without requiring and email/approval, but I do want to reply to my readers right away. My answer to this is to routinely check my comments on an everyday basis!

Starting today I will be more aware. Rest assured, if you leave me a comment, I will reply to you if you have a question or want a discussion!

WiFi Jedi Going Public

Xirrus employee, Douglas Haider, is now going public with his blog. I wanted to help promote it because I do frequent his writings and consider them to be insightful. If you know nothing about Wi-Fi and want to learn more, I suggest checking his blog.

http://wifijedi.wordpress.com/

Pre-Implementation Planning

Xirrus’ very own Douglas Haider has started his very own blog called Wi-Fi Jedi. This man clearly knows what he is talking about. Not to mention that he has a lot of valuable lessons that can be learned by reading his blog.

In his post “Pre-Implementation Planning,” he speaks of his philosophy of “Measure twice, cut once.” This means that you should check every possible resource and then make a decision before making a mistake. His post pertains to deploying Wi-Fi, but the philosophy could be applied to everyday life.

Here is a little portion of his post that deals with Wi-Fi:

I am starting a large district wide implementation of our Xirrus arrays.  This particular deployment is 150+ arrays.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with Xirrus, we aggregate from 4-24 radios (we call them integrated access points) in every device along with a non-blocking Layer 2 switch, WLAN controller, integrated threat sensor and spectrum analyzer.  Our integrated access points utilize directional antennas, which allow us to cover more area using 75% less devices than our competitors.

This is helpful to understand the scope of the project.  While we have 150+ arrays, the competing bids were for approximately 600 access points.   It is certainly not the largest WLAN rollout I have worked on, but larger than most.  My question today is “How do you plan/prepare for large deployments of new technology?”

My personal philosophy goes back to an adage that my father taught me, which was “Measure twice.  Cut once.” There are certain processes that I have used over the years.  These include both a pre-implementation call and a pre-implementation checklist.”

For the full post, please visit Wi-Fi Jedi

Click here for more info on Xirrus