So I've been told to find/buy a new Wireless Router for a company I provide IT for. Networking is not really my strong point, and I've never bought a commercial Wireless Router before. The building in question is a large assisted living home, 4 stories including basement, with the lower two stories being entirely concrete. It's very spread out meaning we'll need a super strength router. Reception at the farther fringes isn't a huge concern as long as it's consistent, mostly will be used for checking email and occasional web browsing. Anyone with experience with these kinds of routers have any suggestions? Most of the ones I'm looking at on Newegg are listed as having poor strength even in as little as 30 feet. Cost is not really a concern, and we're planning on buying multiple + range extenders anyway.
We just use commercial grade ciscos at the office, but I'd suggest asking for one and taking it around the building and checking signals through doors and such. I'm not seeing any of the enterprise grade stuff on newegg, so it may not be the place to look.
Yeah, I've been looking at Cisco's website as well, but they don't really approximate signal strength in feet. I may have to just outsource this to someone who has a better understanding of how this would work.
You're going to need multiple access points to cover a building like that. You don't want range extenders, those are a shitty solution. Multiple APs, staggered wireless channels, all that fun stuff. Meraki is promising, from the little amount of time I've looked into them. I was sad to see they got bought by Cisco, because Cisco ruins everything it touches (see Linksys).
After speaking with a Cisco rep for a while, this was suggested. It seems like a pretty good choice for what we're working with, talking with a local Cisco tech about signal checking/setup/installation now. Thanks for the recommendations guys.
we use Meru hardware for wireless in-house at the company i work for. we've been pretty happy with them (as opposed to Cisco, for whom there isn't anything good to say about). we're spread out across 4 floors, 2 wings per floor, 3 corridors per wing, and a good amount of AP's to cover everything. they handle roaming clients very well in our environment, which is one reason why we went with them. i believe we use something similar to their AP3xx or AP4xx series. beyond that, when we do a few local conferences a year and have to set up our own networking within external facilities, we've been really happy with (surprise) the Apple AirPort Extreme. they're able to handle a lot of connections reliably and also pass off roaming clients pretty well, too.
