Xirrus Wireless

Tue Mar 13 22:32:15 UTC 2012

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
>