Status Update: 05/29

We're in the middle of our 2 weeks of "downtime" before the full-scale deployment starts. So far everything is running fairly smoothly. We did a fail-over test of a primary WESM controller with 151 APs associated with it and that went very well. It's summer so of course, although we have 200+ of the new APs deployed, the total number of simultaneous users is still quite low. We won't truly stress the system until fall classes start.

This Friday Jason and I are doing a Tech Talk for LSPs on the new wireless system. I'll get an overview of the project, and probably the core upgrade project as well, and Jason will cover the details that LSPs will need to know.

Next Friday we're having a "all-hands" meeting of the networking staff. The idea is to present the 10-year network master plan to everyone supporting the network from the installers to the IP engineers, so they understand how this will impact them and what role they will play. There will be a particular focus on the wireless and core upgrade work this summer, the MPLS VPN deployment this fall and support for IPTV and Voice/IP. We're also going to use this meeting as an opportunity to do some performance testing of the new wireless system. We'll be in a fairly large auditorium and should have 60-70 people. We're going to do thing like setup 3 APs and watch how clients balance across the 3 (or not) and put all the uses on a single AP to see how many users and how much bandwidth a single AP can support.

The deployment schedule is completed with approximately 200 APs being installed every week, starting June 9th and wrapping up on August 1st.