Hotel wifi project
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I plan to use pfsense sg-2440 in a hotel captive portal project. I have a 100 room hotel with common areas. Hotel specs call for 1 ap in every other room (in the room, mounted beneath the desk). In total we expect to use 55+ aps
In the past I've used Engenius. These days the consensus seems to be ubiquiti. I am curious about the UB-AP-IW which is a wall plate AP. What's the opinion on those?
If not the wall plate AP, what about general setup recommendations. Given the density of APs is it wise to turn down the transmission on the radios? The building is steel and concrete. In the past we set them to full blast but not nearly that many APs.
whats a good poe switch with vlan support for 16aps?
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Not sure mounted under some desk would be the best place for coverage ;)
As to power and min rssi settings.. I think that decision would be made after you have placed atleast a couple of them to see their coverage area, and how they might conflict with each other.
If your going to use the unifi switches, your prob going to want to use their switches depending on what AP you of theirs. Some of their AP do not support standard poe, so make sure you validate what poe the AP you end up using need. But if you do go with their switches, this ties in with their controller that you use to manage their AP so controlled in one place.
To be honest you prob want to look into the unif controllers captive portal stuff. Its for sure going to be more feature rich then the one in pfsense. They even recently enabled hot spot 2.0 support
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thanks. the hotel specified under the desk in the room or in the closet in the guest room. It's steel studs and a concrete floor on top of steel for the floors. we would need the signal to run horizontally. Testing would be wise, we've a long way to go.
They even recommend an AP in every room! But don't require it. this is a big nationwide chain.
I'll look at the unfi controller however I've done several Pfsense in hotels and have had good results.
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They even recommend an AP in every room!
Yeah, that's usually done with IP-TV settop boxes (mostly from Amino IIRC).
Some of them have an AP built in, are PoE powered and require a single cat cable for everything. Except for creating another VLAN in the switch you have zero installation costs.
The APs are nothing fancy and low power but good for a laptop, a tablet and one smartphone in that room.
