Hello. Now, as we considered the deploy stage, we can split this stage down into three steps. We’ve got installation, configuration, and validation. Now, as a design engineer, you may not be the person performing the physical installation, but you will often work with the installers to make sure that the access points and antennas are mounted and installed in the correct locations and the correct orientation. You see, just providing a location a dot on a map is often not enough to ensure that access points are placed in the correct location. You see, the problem with a dot on a map is it’s saying nothing about the mounting. What brackets should we be using? Should it be mounted on the floor, on the ceiling above the ceiling? Which orientation? You see, lots can go wrong. Just as Stanley is finding out here. And no, Stanley, that’s not okay. You see, we need to provide the installer with clear instructions on the mounting of access points and also the mounting on orientation of antennas.
And we also need to make sure that there’s good communication between the installers and the designer so that if the installer hits a problem with one of the locations, it could be some as busters found, which prevents them from installing the access point in the desired location. Then what we need is our installation team to communicate with the designer and a new location can be agreed upon. Otherwise, we get a situation where the installer makes a decision and they’ll say something like, “Yeah. We couldn’t install it in the center of the office, so we’ve installed it just in the cupboard over the other side of the corridor, just above a metal shelf. It’s very neat and tidy and out the way there.” Now, do make sure you watch the video in this section of the website on access point, and antenna placement, and orientation.
Now, when it comes to our second step configuration, providing that our Mist access points are connected to a network with DHCP and internet connectivity, on the default WLAN. Configuration could either be done pre or post installation. The main reason you would do any pre staging of Mist access posts would be if DHCP was not available on the default WLAN, so you need to pre-stage a static IP address, or you might need to preconfigured a web proxy, although the web proxy settings could be pushed out via DHCP option 43. So, do check out the videos in his deploy section of the website where we will discuss some of the common configuration options relating to wireless LAN design.
Now, the final part of the deploy phase is validation, and this is where we validate the deployed network to make sure it meets all the requirements. And this step may involve many different activities. We need to validate the access point, and antennas have been installed in the correct locations, and the connect orientation. You’re probably going to perform a validation. Our app survey to confirm the installed network meets all our RF requirements such as primary and secondary coverage, signal-to-noise ratio and co-channel contention. We may also do some spectrum analysis to identify any sources of interference. We will probably want to do some roaming testing to confirm we have seamless roaming and any configured roaming protocols are working as expected.
And we may also do some additional application testing. For example, if we’ve designed our network to support seven simultaneous voice calls in one particular area, then we may want to test that to make sure it is possible. Now, validation should always be the final part of our deployment, and it’s important we don’t miss out this step and following its validation there may be some optimization work to fix any issues found. So, that concludes our overview of the deploy phase. Thank you for watching and goodbye.
