AP3705i performance experience

[Ricardo_Lopes]

Hello All,



I’m wondering if any of you could share your experience with the 3705i APs, regarding their performance, specially for those "cost-effective solutions designed to blend in with office, classroom, and hotel environments" (introduce some markting here...) I am asking this, specially regarding hotels, since they has been the main typically installations that we used for.

I don't have any experience in the higher models, for example the 3710 and so on....

What i noted is that the performance sometimes seems quite lower than old 36xx, I wondering if this could be related due to the MIMO 2x2:2, since hotels typically have a lot walls dividing the rooms and the bathrooms and so on... The product information says that they are optimized for drop ceiling deployments, but most customers want the APs hidden due to "aesthetic" reasons... i think hide them is always a bad decision right?

In this kind of deployments should we increase the number of these 3705i AP's or use higher performance models?

Thanks in advance.
Ricardo Lopes

[Thiago_Almeida]

Hi Ricardo,

It is not related to MIMO 2X2:2! This only affects throughput speeds and only very high end laptops/devices that can achieve 3X3:3, the average customer device like smartphones and tables were not capable of 2X2:2 until sometime last year.

What really affects range is: radio transmit power, antenna gains and the environment itself!

What you need to check is the RF design! In hotel design is pretty common that the AP is placed on the hallways and that, for a omni-directional AP is not a good idea! I would recommend (if it is possible) to install de APs inside the rooms, it is better for the RF signal, regarding its propagation through walls!

Usually hotel rooms have the bathroom on the front (entrance) of the room, facing the hallway, this reduces a lot the signal propagation/range due to larger walls, ! Thats why I always recommend my customer to place the APs inside the rooms when its possible.

I would strongly recommend a site survey with some professional tools to measure the real RSSI that is propagation throughout the environment.

Regards,

TA