Installing and maintaining a wireless network is much more complex than a traditional wired network, from the technical side. (not counting the sweat work of running the cable)
You've got do a HUGE amount of planning and make some tough decisions - Do you want to do MAC address filtering, forcing each user to register their card? Do you want to try to run some kind of VPN tunnel across the air link for security, authentication, and user tracking? If you do the former, you have to come up with a way to manage 5,000+ MAC addresses and distribute them across the network. If you do the latter, you have to deal with never-ending client issues with the VPN software. (And it breaks a lot of other stuff)
Since you're going to be sharing a single 11 or 54Mb/s point between a bunch of people, how do you fairly split the bandwidth, or do you even bother? Dedicated 100Mb/s is much easier to deal with.
In the installation, you have to deal with the design work of placement of the antennas. You have to consider coverage, interference sources, # users per AP, etc. You've got to come up with some way to get power out there (usually by using a switch with inline power like Cisco or a Cat5 power extender). You've got to get them installed, tested, etc. (That's the easy part).
Security is also huge. How do you keep your wireless traffic from getting intercepted? How do you make sure that only authorized machines use it? After all, you don't want that high school sophmore with a laptop hanging around the quad to try to hack into the FBI, on your circuits.
From a management perspective, you need to come up with some way to support all of this mess. You've converted your network from 1 active switch per building to 15+ access points, each with a much lower MBTF, PLUS the switch. Figure you're going to blow one of them per week or so. Dealing with penetration attempts from war drivers will also be fun. THEN take into account the MAC address database you'd need to support this. How many people would this all take?
There ARE products to help automate some of this and increase security - Wavelink makes
Mobile Manager, which has some pretty good tricks. But it's price.
Trust me on this, it's not a trivial undertaking of slapping up some AP's and calling it good. That's absolutely inviting a huge disaster and major potential legal issues when someone takes advantage of your open Access points. I was involved in designing the network infrastructure, encryption scheme and authentication for my organization's deployment of a mobile infrastructure that will eventually be deployed to 2,800 sites that carries a great deal of confidential data about our customers (like ATM card numbers, PIN codes, account information, name/address/ssn, etc.). It was a heck of a fun project, but the network was pretty heinous and even the pilot cost a HUGE chunk of change. Obviously, I'm not a wireless expert, so we brought in some real pros to handle that aspect of it. We found that running a VPN client on a PocketPC across a wireless network is a bit challenging.
I'd say that Spidey is pretty close with his estimates - The only thing I'd add would be that the cost of the management software and custom development efforts would be significant and pricey, unless you can find something off-the-shelf that meets your needs.
One last recommendation - If you do it, try and look for a full solution from a vendor. AP's, NIC's, management software, etc.
Symbol has some nice service offerings, and the partnership of Wavelink and Cisco is pretty slick, too. Cisco has the advantage of
LEAP built into their AP's and cards. That helps alleviate a lot of the issues with WEP.
- G
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