Need Confirmation of my Assessment

[reyrey1332]

So I have just been hired as a network admin of a warehouse type environment. I walked into a wireless network of users complaining on a daily basis of weak and limited connections to the WLAN. The setup consists of roughly 10 access points plotted across the entire warehouse. Here is the problem I see. The warehouse ceiling is about 40 feet high. All the AP's are mounted on the ceilings. These are all omnidirectional access points. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't these send the coverage area 360 degrees horizontally? I believe we are basically creating a donut of coverage around the ceiling and not enough is reaching the floor. We are using the 1, 6, and 11 channels accordingly and transmit levels are set at about 50%.

I think the solution is to either bring the current AP's down to a lower level, or switch them out with directional antennas...can someone agree or disagree with my assessment?

Jeff

 

[13thmonkey]

whether or not they send out a horizontal band you are certainly losing a lot of power to always being 40+ft away, and bringing them down to 10ft would be better (10ft so that they are out of the way of forklift traffic and such.