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Avoiding WLAN Set-up Headaches (Part I) By Gerry Blackwell The sudden explosion of Wi-Fi equipment on the market and the broad acceptance of the technology by business and home users is mostly a good thing for the industry and for users. But there is a downside. Vendors, not without justification, have pushed the idea that Wi-Fi networks are extremely easy to set up - and so they are sometimes. But sometimes, a lot of times, they're not. Too many companies are trying to do their own installs with only the most rudimentary understanding of the equipment and of RF technology. Many as a result screw up. It's too bad. Some of the mistakes they make are eminently avoidable. At this week's 802.11 Planet conference in San Jose CA, we're convening a panel of grizzled veterans of the fixed wireless wars to discuss "Building & Equipping Wireless Networks That Work." It's essential training for novice WLAN designers. We thought we'd offer a little conference preview, though, so we called on panelist Jesse Frankel, chief strategy officer and vice president of advanced technology at NeTeam Corp. (www.neteam.com) in Akron OH. "There are cases," says Frankel, "where you can take the equipment out of the box, turn it on and it works. But there are many others where it's a lot more complex." Frankel, with over ten years experience in the field, including pioneering work at Austin TX-based Wayport Inc. (www.wayport.com), was a perfect choice for our conference forum. His company, which refers to itself as "The Wireless Network Architects," has worked with scores of clients across the eastern U.S., setting up office WLANs, campus networks, point-to-point bridges and even a few wide area access networks - mostly using 2.4 GHz spectrum. The company also has offices in Atlanta and southern Florida. NeTeam is the designer of one of the largest Cisco Aironet installations - if not the largest - in the U.S., at the University of Akron right in the company's home town. The UA network will eventually provide broadband wireless coverage in every one of the campus's 80-odd buildings and across all the green spaces in between. So far the build-out includes 650 access point, but the NeTeam design calls for double that number. In the first of this two-part article, Jesse Frankel talks about some of the common mistakes self-installers make and how to solve them. In the second part, we'll take a more step-by-step approach to designing WLANs that work. Not surprisingly perhaps, Frankel suggests that sometimes self-installers can't solve all the problems they encounter, that it takes an expert - like him. Still, some problems are avoidable as we'll see. One of the most egregious design blunders Frankel has ever seen was by an unnamed company that set up a point-to-point bridge to link two buildings. The design and install were done during the winter when the trees were bare. You can guess what happened. "Come spring," Frankel relates, "they discovered there were leaves in the way of the path. Which totally screwed up the reliability of the link. It's obviously something you need to take into account." The key mistakes made: poor path analysis - or no path analysis at all - and inappropriate selection of antenna. Most companies recognize that setting up outdoor point-to-point bridges requires specialized expertise and wouldn't think of doing it themselves, he says. But the same is not true of indoor office WLANs. "The main problem we see in WLAN self-installations i