Marina Wifi expert advice needed

Corky

Corky

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Hi
we're a self help marina on the south coast who are very successful but we are suffering wifi problems with our setup. We have a modem and router in the club house with 4 AP repeaters across the marina pontoons. Reception on the AP repeaters is spasmodic. Doing a walkaround test we carried out a few checks using ‘Wifi Analyser’. All APS were visible with fair signal strengths. However we get frequent instances of the repeaters not being visible and many drop-offs. We have had members who are telecoms experts look at the setup who declare no wiring issues. It has been suggested that all the masts are causing loss of signal.

Does anyone have the professional expertise to suggest a good setup? I'm not an expert in any way but seem to be the person charged with finding a solution.
 
I would suggest it could be too many clients connecting? Smaller APs drop clients if they get too many connections. I am guessing that by using repeaters you are daisy chaining them together over the wireless meaning that the usage on the final "connections" to the core router are too much. You need some pretty sophisticated Access Points to make this configuration work, particularly if you are expecting mobility (seamless moving from Access Point to Access Point) to work. In particular, clients that can see the same SSID visible may hunt between APs which will result in failure. I know Aruba do systems specifically designed to do this but they are not cheap.
 
Ideally to fix the existing setup but if there is an affordable solution without too much re-installation we may consider that.
 
Are you sure the issue is with the access points. A common problem I see is that the WAN link (internet connection) is the bottle neck. Usually the wifi networks speeds is a multiple of the telco internet speed. We visit a marina is the summer where when it rains and the kids get out their tablets the wifi seems to crash but it is just the telco link that is saturated. However if I do some work when most people are in bed the wifi is fine. If the AP's SSID becomes invisible there could be an issue with the AP. My own marina intially used some low end products that were more suited for point to point links than serving many clients. Their wifi crashed regularly untill they replaced the AP with something more powerfull.
 
Have you considered investigating what other marinas do / I would have thought that the trade body for marina operators would have an expert on topic but maybe not. Clealry consulataion with other marinas who have no doubt visited these issues already might yield some useful connections so maybe a post on the marina owners website if it exists would elicit more recommendations than here amongst boaters who just suffer from the poor set ups you seem to encounter from most locations .
 
The wireless speed is often a fraction of the Internet speed!. Dont believe the "54Mbs" Wireless speed promises.

Leaving aside new technologies (MIMO etc). underneath it is half-duplex radio. Again ignoring the complex maths and packet sizing/windowing (I know someone will comment), 54Mbs is only 27Mbs half duplex. Put two clients on it and it becomes 13.5Mbs half duplex etc. etc. So very quickly wireless become very narrow band. Yes - new techniques work to mitigate this but I bet no-one sees much better than 1Mbs on an outdoor implementation with a comparatively low AP density.

Indoors in a professionally built WiFi installation with latest APs and properly heat mapped install I am seeing 26Mbs on a system that is "sold" as 876Mbs, I will walk out into the car-park and see what the free space bandwidth is. (and ours drops clients if individual APs are overloaded (packed meeting room in corner of building).

EDIT: 1.5Mbs outside coverage from a couple of AP's on building roof edge
 
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We use the Cloudtrax cloud managed WiFi system for our hotels. These have been very cost effective and appear to handle multiple clients quite well. As a guide we have one hotel with 4 APs that would regularly have 50 clients at any one time. They also have external enclosures available and can be meshed if you want to add more APs without running network cable.

http://www.open-mesh.com/solutions/modular-wifi.html

Paul
 
Which wifi channels are your repeaters on? I understand that there can be problems with overlap, which are reduced if you stick to channels 1, 6 and 11.

It might be worth finding out how the wifi is set up at Bangor Marina (NI) ... and doing something different, because theirs is dreadful, with all the problems you are now seeing.
 
In all our travels I haven't found a single Marina wifi setup that delivered meaningful bandwidth or stable connection. Marina-wifi is a byword for pants internet. Surely everyone now uses a dongle or makes their own hotspot?
 
I haven't read through the thread, but....

What make / model AP's do you have? Are they just dumb AP's? Or are they configurable? ie. Bandwidth throttling etc.

Are these AP's handy ones bought from PC World, or specific AP's built for purpose?

We install enterprise-wide WiFi networks for apartment blocks / schools / hotels. Each AP can take up to 100 clients / cloud based configuration / bandwidth throttle / QoS / time limits etc. etc...

From the sounds of things, you don't have the hardware that is required for the service you are trying to provide. No point in having a 100Mbps+ WAN connection if someone is hogging half of it downloading a series of Benidorm.
 
Colvic Watson said:
In all our travels I haven't found a single Marina wifi setup that delivered meaningful bandwidth or stable connection. Marina-wifi is a byword for pants internet. Surely everyone now uses a dongle or makes their own hotspot?
Click to expand...

The main issue with WiFi in a marina is the area. The only solution is multiple AP's. Christ, we installed a system in a SMALL school not so long ago - it still had 12 AP's!

I suspect most marina WiFi 'systems' are a router in the office, with a directional antenna pointing in the general direction of boats... forget about it.
 
Wide area wi-fi can be very "quirky" depending on so many environmental factors.. I don't know how many times I have put networks together and discovered unexpected issues when it was all switched on.. The good news is there are a few ways to structure the network so there is usually a way around the issues..
 
If anyone needs good wifi Port Solent is the place, it's better there than my home which has infinity, strangely the wifi at Swanwick Marina is rubbish and was the subject of many complaints when it was installed.
 
Hi

thaks for the reply. Marinas have diffrent problems to hotels with the AP's and clients being set in a sea of metal masts. How do you feel it would cope with that?

The current setup has modem and router in the club-house with the AP's (5) hard wired to the router and spread across the pontoons on poles approx 8ft high.
 
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First off poles are too low imo. At that height you will get a lot of scatter and interference especially if you have set up antenna as omnidirectional. More importantly though are you taking advantage of any native beamforming or the latest Wave2 technology?
 
Our practically experience is that more than 8 connections on one AP will significantly drop the wireless speed.
 
Trying to design by committee will not get anywhere, unfortunately you really need a proper on-site analysis of the requirements to get a solution. For wireless networks the solution can often be counter-intuitive to normal radio. For example, winding back the AP transmit power to significantly lower levels, reducing AP height, increasing AP density etc. all can give excellent results. In your case 8 ft poles can be fine, metal masts can be fine but no-one really knows.

I think investment in a proper analysis of the issue is the only way forward.
 
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