Wireless network setup. Help appreciated.

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I'm trying to prepare to deploy a wireless network in our London office and I'm torn between Aruba and Cisco gear. I'd prefer Cisco because I don't know anything about Aruba kit so I was wondering if anyone here has worked with it? Is it worth the price? It seems more expensive than Cisco kit.

The office is going to be used for meetings and conferences so I'm looking for a solution that will handle 2 crowded floors. I need seamless routing between access points on both floors and centralised remote management.

The floor plans are attached if anyone's interested.

I was thinking of getting 8 Cisco Aironet APs and a WLC. I haven't looked into them in detail yet so I don't know which particular models I would need/want.

I also want the access points to serve 2 VLANs: one for public access, and one for internal access for Domain joined machines. I believe that's possible with RADIUS on NPS and pretty much every Cisco wireless gear that supports Radius and VLAN's.

I haven't set anything like that up before so I will need to do some reading and any pointers would be much appreciated. (Links to some material on the subject would be perfect).

Cheers

 

I'd say 20 people per WAP max. It's going to be used for VOIP (Lync), on-site staff for general use (or presenting on laptops), all attendees who are bored and are browsing. We don't anticipate a lot of web traffic but we want to provide a good experience for emails, sharing photos, and everything else. We're still discussing the connectivity options but we're definitely looking at a dedicated line 50Mbit+.

 

The budget is a bit over £10k but I'm not prepared to spend nowhere near that! But we'll see how it goes.

 

That's actually a great idea. Thanks. Will make some calls tomorrow.

 

I looked at Cisco gear that will do the job today and we're thinking of:

- 8 x Aironet 1140 AP
- 1 x Cisco WLC 2500
- 1 x Catalyst PoE switch

We're also considering getting another switch for redundancy.

Oh and Cisco WLC 2500 with 15 AP licenses is cheaper than with 10 AP licenses.