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Anyone use Zyxel access points?

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lsharvell

New Around Here
Specifically the NWA5123-ni?

I have a hotel that I'm upgrading the wireless for. I like the NWA5123 because it is dual radio, has auto channel setup, has an optional external controller and the price.

The building has 6 floors and 107 rooms, is standard metal framed construction with concrete floors.

I hoping to use 6 AP's per floor, mounted in the ceilings of the hallways.

So the questions I'm looking to answer is this:

1. Any quality issues that you have experienced?
2. How close are you able to place the access points?
3. How good does their signal seem to be compared to other access points?

Thanks,
Scott
 
Just something to make you aware of.
when you have 36 APs to manage, the controller is no longer "optional". Make sure to factor the Controller and Licenses required into your cost.

I have not dealt with that exact model, but have had pretty good experience with other zyxel products in the past (NAS, Switches, Firewalls, and WAPS). The WAPs I personally dealt with were the NWA3000 series.

As for your direct questions:
1. One was DOA out of 22 WAPs. Got an RMA within a few days and they have been going strong for about 4-5 years now.
2. Trick questions. I can place them 250ft away in a ballroom with full open air and 30 inches away with aluminum paneled concrete and rebar in between. The only way you could answer this question properly is with a site survey.
3. Pretty good but nothing OMG special. Don't expect to be able to punch through too many walls. Say 3 sheetrock/aluminum stud walls straight max before you drop to below 65/70db.

P.S.
A nice free tool for planning:
http://www.aerohive.com/build-your-network/estimate-your-aps
Use the Aerohive AP121 in lieu of the Zyxel model for the estimates. It is roughly the same when it comes to range and penetration.
 
I agree with the need to use pro gear. I will throw Ubiquiti Ap's in the mix as I have had good luck with them. I am not sure how versed you are with wireless but this could be a disaster if not planned correctly. One example is your channels. I assume you are going to use 2.4Ghz Ap's. On the 2.4Ghz band there are only 3 non-overlapping channels - 1,6, and 11. You must plan out how to get the most distance between AP's using the same channel or they will interfere with each other.
 
Yes I understand a fair bit about wireless networks. I have been designing and building networking equipment for 30 years. The whole purpose of the controller aspect is that it helps to deal with AP overlap, because it can see the big picture view.

With respect to "consumer crap" I have had numerous issues with Netgears pro grade equipment as well as Cisco's business products.

Most of this equipment is made from the very same chipsets just with different software in front.

I'm currently replacing an existing network that was based on 16 Netgear WG302 access points and a FVS336 router. I had put this network in a number of years ago but we are just running out of steam.

I originally ran into the Zyxel gear because of their GS1900-8HP managed switch, which seems to get good reviews is a great price for a managed switch. One of the current issues that we run into is that the switches lock up on occasion and I can only tell because I cannot get to that set of access points. Having some visibility in the switches would certainly help.

Anyway once I started looking at the products, and reviews it seems that many folks are quite happy with them.

So unless you have some actual experience that you can quote I don't see much value in the "that stuff is just consumer crap" kind of statement. As a matter of fact they seem to have a fully featured set of products. Not trying to be a jerk, just trying to collect real data and not offhand opinions.

I should note that while I don't do this kind of work (I'm an embedded software engineer) I do understand networking gear.

This is not a paying job for me. This is a condo hotel that I happen to own a unit in and give a hand to build out the network. We have a very limited budget to work with and those other vendors would blow that in a hurry.
 
Zyxel doesn't have the brand recognition that some of the other names have, but I've generally found them to be competent and reliable.

Also consider EnGenius - reasonably priced...

sfx
 
Specifically the NWA5123-ni?

I have a hotel that I'm upgrading the wireless for. I like the NWA5123 because it is dual radio, has auto channel setup, has an optional external controller and the price.

The building has 6 floors and 107 rooms, is standard metal framed construction with concrete floors.

I hoping to use 6 AP's per floor, mounted in the ceilings of the hallways.

So the questions I'm looking to answer is this:

1. Any quality issues that you have experienced?
2. How close are you able to place the access points?
3. How good does their signal seem to be compared to other access points?

Thanks,
Scott

Couple of other things to consider - before tearing down the existing network, do a site survey on the existing network.

There's a couple great tools out there - Ehaku Heatmapper is great, and you can drop in the floor plans and see what the current coverage is.

http://www.ekahau.com/wifidesign/ekahau-heatmapper

Also consider on the build-out of the new network - traffic patterns/user habits have changed dramatically - figure 3 devices per guest/resident (Laptop, SmartPhone, and Tablet) - and my general rule of thumb when planning out..

1) 1500 sq ft per 2.4GHz AP... 750 sq ft for 5GHz...
2) 15-20 devices per radio/per channel

With this many rooms/floors - you also need to consider the backhaul requirements for the network backbone...

This is a fair sized project - might consider bringing in a CWNP guy for a consult... this is fairly beyond the free advice we can offer here ;)
 
Thanks for the other vendor to look at. I actually did map the existing network when I installed it a number of years ago. Problem is that it is hard to tell what the signal is like in all of the rooms as I don't really have access to them. The WG302's were tough because they have adjustable antennas and I'm sure I could spend all week trying to position those to the best spot.

The biggest issue is just more equipment on the network and not enough Signal coverage. We have to run the AP's in the hallways in the ceilings, but some of the hallways have no ceiling tiles. At this point we will have to run conduit out to exposed AP's in those sections. However they should be high enough to stay out of harms way!

There are 107 rooms.

The rest of the system will be updated from 100MB to 1GB. We currently use 1 distribution switch off the router which connects to a switch on each floor, then each floor fans out to three access points using PoE. Another nice thing about the Zyxel managed switches is that they provide up to a total of 80 watts across all eight ports for PoE. The AP's draw 7 watts each so up to six should be OK.

The big limitation will always be the fact that we are limited to 50MB out of the building. But that will be a step up from the current 15MB.

Like I said very limited budget so they are stuck with just me!

Thanks for everyone for their experiences.
 
Zyxel doesn't have the brand recognition that some of the other names have, but I've generally found them to be competent and reliable.

Also consider EnGenius - reasonably priced...

sfx

I too have had good luck with Zyxel. My little $20 P-330W is one of the most reliable and robust home networking devices I've ever owned.
 
I too have had good luck with Zyxel. My little $20 P-330W is one of the most reliable and robust home networking devices I've ever owned.

Oh wow... the Zyxel P-330W is the same model I encouraged a friend to get for his Gas Station - for general purposes (not PCI/Credit Cards) and digital signage - four islands/8 screens and remote access to his Surveillance/DVR cams -- it's been rock solid for 4 years now - wall wart went bad a few months back, but once that was replaced, it's still online.

It sits in a closet next to his DSL modem and a IPSEC/VPN router for his Point of Sale (register and pump card readers). The DSL modem provides two IP end-points, one for the Zyxel, the other for the IPSEC/VPN device (yes, two separate LAN's, not VLAN's)
 
I'm also looking at ZyXEL, based on friend's experience with them, and my own w/ their firewalls.

One minus is their outdoor unit is $900 vs. $400 for UniFi, but their indoor dual freq are far cheaper. To me, it's a wash pricewise.
 
The big limitation will always be the fact that we are limited to 50MB out of the building. But that will be a step up from the current 15MB.
Please use th convention of "B" meaning bytes and "b" meaning bits.
Or spell it out.

Opinion: 50Mbps to share among 107 rooms with the usage statistics in the busy hours (after dinner) - that 50Mbps might be good enough.
You could use a router that stops bandwidth hogging such as streaming video for long times.
 
Just thought I would come back and update this post.

About 4 months ago I performed the upgrade with all new Zyxel equipment.

In recap I was dealing with a six story 107 room hotel/Inn with concrete floors and steel frame construction. The Internet connection is a 50Mb cable internet modem via Time Warner business class offering.

The previous equipment was all Netgear, with an FVS336g router, 5 eight port 100Mb PoE switches and 16 WG302 access points. This had been OK, but as people now connect their phones, tablets, kids stuff as well as their computers we just started having lots of issues. The other issue that we had was that a large portion of the building had poor wireless coverage. Originally we could not run AP's to the upper floors because those floors do not have dropped ceilings and the WG302 is not really designed for mounting in the open.

Going forward I wanted to support wireless N (was not concerned about AC at this point), as well as doing both 2.4 and 5 ghz.

I installed the following equipment:
1 NXC2500 wireless controller
1 ZyWall 310 - really just used as a router
1 GS1900-24E managed Gigabit switch
6 GS1900-8HP managed Gigabit PoE switches
31 NWA5123-NI Dual radio N access points

When I got all of the equipment the wireless controller has a bad power supply, however I was able to use a spare power supply from one of the AP's to do initial configuration. Zyxel sent me a replacement power supply right away. I had no other quality issues.

I staged everything before hand to figure out how to configure these things. They certainly are different and I worked with the Zyxel support to figure out some of the issues. That was a mixed bag, I kept having to have my sales contact intervene to get timely answers from support, but in the end I always got the information I was looking for.

I made one time consuming mistake during my configuration. When you are managing the AP's with a wireless controller you configure the AP to boot from the controller, it then downloads a new image from the controller. However once configured that way you can only mange the AP via the controller. I was going through a box of AP's and setting them up, after I got through 15 of them I realized that when I thought I was programming their IP address I was programming the address that they were going to use to contact the controller. At this point there is no easy way out. You cannot reset the AP to a default state. To fix this I had to configure the Wireless Controller (WC) to be the address that each AP thought it was, then boot the AP, let it discover the WC download the new firmware, then through the WC I could configure the AP to go back to unmanaged mode, which means handloading the original firmware back to the AP. All in all fairly time consuming. At least I had not changed all of them!

After doing a very scaled back trial setup in my house I was able to determine the configuration for all of the equipment and pre configured everything. During my staging time I had the maintenance guys run new wiring to support the new access points. Then on a weekday in the off season we shutdown the old network and installed all of the new equipment. Other than having a few address mix ups (which were easy to find because I could see the addresses via the new managed switches) the bring up was uneventful.

Even more important it all just worked! Given that the lodge is in ski country and we just spent all winter getting hammered with snow, the place has been packed every weekend and the new network has worked flawlessly. We now regularly have 200+ end points and 6000+ concurrent connections at any given time. We used to get complaints all weekend about the network, since the install there have been zero complaints. You used to only be able to stream Netflix when the lodge was empty, now you can stream Netflix on a Saturday evening.

The new network has been up for 4 months, during that time we had one instance where we had service provider issues, after they were settled there was still a problem and we had to reboot some of the AP's to clear things up. The WC made it so much easier to reboot them, before we had to go into the ceilings and power cycle the switches to reset the AP's on a given floor.

Originally I had planned on using the filtering controls to limit bandwidth hogs, but so far it has been unnecessary, we have not had any issues. It is great to finally have visibility into the network with the managed switches so I can see where the traffic is coming and going as well as having a central point of control for all of the AP's in the past I had to manage the 16 APs individually that would be a real pain with 31 APs.

Overall I'm really pleased with the equipment and how well it has been working. All of the floors now have good wireless service (because they just look like smoke detectors they don't look bad on the open ceiling floors), and we have had zero customer complaints about the Internet service.

On top of everything else this was a real bargain, I would not have been able to do this with any other vendor for the price we paid, everything was on the order of 9K total.

I would recommend that anyone consider this equipment if they are doing something similar.
 
Excellent job. It is good to hear about these smaller wireless systems. Looking at the price of this controller on Amazon it is less than $300. This is something which could be used in a larger home. I have over a 3000 sq foot house and just cannot cover my house with one wireless device. I might have seriously considered this system for my house. I just bought 2 Cisco WAP321 wireless devices and couple of switches to run a guess network all around my house.
 
Good to hear the Zyxel equipment is working for you. I just completed an installation at a hotel where I used a very similar setup that you have above with the NWA5123 APs and a NXC2500 controller. The only difference in my setup was that I used a USG40 instead of the 310 and I used a ES1100-16P switch. The site only had eight APs so no need for the VLAN setups like you have with 6 remote switches. I too have been very pleased with the performance of the NWA 5123 line.
 
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