WSNUP experiences

[WHS Ict Technician]

Did any one else have to do contractor's work for them for the WSNUP?

I'm being asked to create plans / mark every AP and whiteboard / provide photos etc. for all our existing setup.

I'm happy doing the ict side of things - i have all that information, but drawing plans seems to be drifting in to the contractor side of the jobs.

That's a significant expenditure of time... I thought the were supposed to come in and survey the place for us.

[Alistair Baird]

I spent about a week drawing ours up, had my son come in and help me, but that was because we had changed our network by about 95%. I only hand drew them, then scanned them in. We have had our school being upgraded to MLE, just about to start the last block next week. The data contractors and/or architect don't understand the need for accurate diagrams - I have the originals mapped on my wall as I often refer to them (well, especially with all the building work, guess that will settle down now., Just got the plans back and they're all nicely drawn up by TorqueIP, but no the detailed outlet numbers..... 

It does say in the WSNUP initial documents that the school is responsible for updating the drawings, and at their expense (if that involves contracting your IT supplier), but in our case it was me...

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Alistair Baird

IT Manager

St Peters College 

p 06 354 4198

m 021 482 937

e bai...@stpeterspn.school.nz

[flow in]

I guess the bit that is annoying me is that they want me to mark all the whiteboards. 
We want 1 ap per classroom, to match our current deployment, so i don't want to waste time helping them design a plan that has to take whiteboards into account as they block signal passing through walls.

i'm just irritated, i guess. They told me they wouldn't update the switches, which the ministry says definitely has to happen, then they ask me to do pointless work. Might just can it before we even start.

[Jude Elliot]

Pretty time consuming I found. And same, had to find plans of work done since original SNUP try and track down who did cabling etc as some happened without IT area even knowing. Hours of work involved. One asbuilt pdf supplied wasn't even the right one. The original SNUP contractor had a more accurate one. And the time frame I have failed to meet.

Jude

[gre...@staff.cbhs.school.nz]

Heh.
Doing that plan prep-work is a tiny sliver of the wsnup-induced time you'll expend if you care about your network at all.
YMMV of course.

- Ben.

[flow in]

We already have a wireless  system, with heaps of work done on it including full spectral anaylsis done with netspot.

Probably why this irks so much, wanting to know about wall compositions so that they can push signal through them is not my idea of good wifi!

[Patrick Dunford]

They have some formula for the number of access points, unlikely to be one per classroom (in my experience) unless the school is prepared to pay additional cost.

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[Patrick Dunford]

That isn't necessarily an issue because if they have the right backbone, these industrial wireless units can handle a hundred connections (or more) without performance hits. We have done a Ubiquiti installation with one AP per classroom but that is mainly for redundancy and concrete walls, IMO. If you had wooden walls then one every two or three classrooms would be OK.

[Alistair Baird]

The 'formula' is based on our school's classroom entitlement -  - see http://pmis.minedu.govt.nz plus your admin area and other areas like the Gym and Library etc, and it is roughly 1 AP per two adjacent classrooms. We have reasonable coverage with our existing 23 AP's, but the new plan allows us 29, they are replacing our older AP's but we re-use our newer ones. Our entitlement worked out at 34.

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[flow in]

There are other issues at play.
We would like to keep our energy levels down, and i'd like to keep using wide channels for throughput (ref the whitepaper that showed that ruckus gear couldn't manage the wide/fast channels when placed outside a classroom, so was outperformed by apple (!) gear so the test was artificially limited to narrow channels) we've had to restrict student mobile devices, but we'd like them to be able to be used too. That's up to 60 clients _per classroom_. We'd also like to be moderately future proofed and to be able to work well with chromebooks (known to have issues with distant 5ghz).

With high-capacity deployments, energy levels are often much higher, which has unknown health effects. APs located through walls often drops clients with weaker wifi down to the 2.4Ghz spectrum and can drain batteries significantly faster. It is much harder to control spectral overlap with less APs, since the increased power form both AP and client pushed the signal much further along lines of reduced absorbance. RSSI/multicast based roaming also gets tricker on a subset of clients.  plus, if one unit fails, a far larger chunk is of users is affected.

High-density deployments are the way forward for the next few years at least, so i'm very unhappy and disinclined to revert to a high capacity one, when we've already seen such an improvement in our wifi since we moved away from that three years ago. All the bells and whistles of the multi antenna boxes don't change the laws of physics.

Anyway, that's added to them asking me to do a bunch more work than i have time for. I think we'll get a cost estimate from them, if we can, for the entitlement provision, then get a couple more quotes and compare it to a straight unifi ac upgrade of our existing (fabulous) deployment.

[Alistair Baird]

If you want them to go ahead with the pricing/tender based on the Ministry standard install, this is what you will get [a ministry standard install using one of their preferred wireless solutions]. It you want the cash and go spend on your existing investment, they won't do that. If you don't like what they are offering, then pass up on the offer, save yourself a heap of work doing the tendering/drawings process.

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[Craig Knights]

But when we got snup way back when, we added some stuff and just had to pay the extra..  It was mostly to do with phone cabling.

ta

CJK

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Alistair Baird

IT Manager

St Peters College 

p 06 354 4198

m 021 482 937

e bai...@stpeterspn.school.nz

[flow in]

If only they'd give us a cost estimate BEFORE i do the unnecessary work, so that we can get an idea of how much it would cost us to bring it up to our requirements...

[Alistair Baird]

The cynical part of me says they have a hidden agenda contract to gather data for the ministry to establish a true and accurate state of school's networks.

On 16 September 2016 at 11:59, flow in <i...@westlandhigh.school.nz> wrote:

If only they'd give us a cost estimate BEFORE i do the unnecessary work, so that we can get an idea of how much it would cost us to bring it up to our requirements...

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[Julian Davison]

I certainly hope not. Given the change most networks see such a hidden agenda contract would be futile.

On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 12:06 PM, Alistair Baird <bai...@stpeterspn.school.nz> wrote:

The cynical part of me says they have a hidden agenda contract to gather data for the ministry to establish a true and accurate state of school's networks.

On 16 September 2016 at 11:59, flow in <i...@westlandhigh.school.nz> wrote:

If only they'd give us a cost estimate BEFORE i do the unnecessary work, so that we can get an idea of how much it would cost us to bring it up to our requirements...

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Alistair Baird

IT Manager

St Peters College 

p 06 354 4198

m 021 482 937

e bai...@stpeterspn.school.nz

[Tim Harper]

Hmm.  Given that it is government money that funds a school network what is the issue in government establishing a true and accurate picture on the state of their investment?

regards,

Tim Harper


Phone 03 443 5167 (messages cannot be left on this number)
Mobile 027 443 1236

t...@mtaspiring.school.nz
www.mtaspiring.school.nz

[Patrick Dunford]

Energy levels from a hand held device (phone) are always the greatest
aren't they?

Anyway it is only a few hours a day, the time they spend at home could
add up to a lot more.

[Pete Mundy]

This man speaketh great truth!

+1

Pete

On 15/09/2016, at 5:02 pm, gre...@staff.cbhs.school.nz wrote:

Heh.
Doing that plan prep-work is a tiny sliver of the wsnup-induced time you'll expend if you care about your network at all.
YMMV of course.

- Ben.

On Thursday, September 15, 2016 at 2:42:53 PM UTC+12, WHS Ict Technician wrote:

Did any one else have to do contractor's work for them for the WSNUP?

I'm being asked to create plans / mark every AP and whiteboard / provide photos etc. for all our existing setup. 

<snip>

[Patrick Dunford]

School I worked with did the work then decided not to go with their project, being integrated they had a choice.

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