recognizing a previous connection

[Greg Smith]

Hi Pia, Robert, Mikus and team,

I'm not sure this dictates the right design, but I am aware of several 
sites planning to use multiple access points.

One in the US will have ~40! and I believe that another in the US (NYC) 
has many APs and a robust network.

One school in Rwanda has recently been funded to install 10 x APs.

That said, I think our biggest deployments in Peru and Uruguay have 
either 1 or none (perhaps Erik G can confirm).

One of the reasons to have multiple APs and a school server is to scale 
the number of XOs that can collaborate. I'm told that when an AP and XS 
are used, the wireless uses unicast to the AP instead of multicast in a 
mesh allowing better optimization of the available BW. Then the XS 
Jabber server can connect them. In that case, I think it would be 
preferred to have a set of XOs consistently tied to the same AP.

BTW the active antenna is not currently sold or deployed. It's likely to 
come back in the future but right now it is on hold.

Thanks for the Niue URL. That's great detail!

We are trying strenuously to get this kind of detail down to the AP type 
and model for all current or pending deployments. As soon as we have 
something verified to share, we will post it.

Thanks,

Greg S

***************
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2008 07:45:13 +1000 From: Pia Waugh <greebo at pipka.org> 
Subject: Re: recognizing a previous connection To: "rihoward1 at gmail.com" 
<rihoward1 at gmail.com> Cc: devel at laptop.org Message-ID: 
<20080910214513.GR19483 at pipka.org> Content-Type: text/plain; 
charset=us-ascii Hi all, <quote who="rihoward1 at gmail.com">
 > > It is my understanding that deployments with larger schools will be 
  using
 > > WAPs and possibly some active antennas (currently a shortage of these).
 > > These large schools are more like the G1G1 situation as  the pupil 
moves
 > > from one area of the school to another they may  connect to another 
AP.  I
 > > have informed a person involved with deployment at large schools of 
  this
 > > thread (and the other thread). I am hoping they will respond  with
 > > information about the wireless topography.

Actually, you can overcome this in a large school by using a WDS network, or
by simply giving all the access points the same name, then as the student
moves around the campus they seamlessly switch from AP to AP, as it is
effectively the same wireless network.

I did this at two schools of ~200-250 students each with a WDS setup (as
they didn't have ethernet to the classrooms), and it worked perfectly. If
you have ethernet to the classrooms, then APs with the same ESSID would work
even better. Details here:

   http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Niue#Documentation

Cheers,
Pia