I had a good idea.
We're looking to spend a lot of money on a new wireless solution on our main campus (ten buildings - 2000 staff - square km or so). It'll be dead smart and do lots of very cool things. But when I was in a meeting and our CIO was getting angry about money and stuff I had a director grade idea of brilliance and blurted my idea out in an effort to get him to stop swearing.
"Let's get BT Open zone in to provide wireless completely separate from our network. Then it's a ongoing managed cost which is easier to project for, we don't have to manage it and quite frankly, we don't give a toss what people do with it."
The room went silent for a few seconds and then he pointed at me. I waited for him to do his Alan Sugar thing but he didn't.
"That's a great idea!" he exclaimed, turned his back on us and said 'the door's the wooden thing in the wall"
Obviously by now it's his idea but has anyone got any experience of doing this before? We've got a very large campus here so it'll be a fairly large investment up front I should imagine but after that, fairly cheap and I expect BT (or whoever) will be happy because it will encourage our staff to use them and get free wireless or something.
We'll be talking to our telecoms providers to see what they think about this but I'd be interested in any experiences you guys have either as clients or initiators of such a service.
Ta.
It'll be shit, which will stop anyone wasting time on it and [s]you[/s] your CIO will be a genius
My experience of BT in the corporate world is that you will spend a long time waiting for them to do stuff, and it won't always be right.
And they'll do stuff that will break your network because it suits their needs.
And they'll charge you a lot to put it right.
And....etc
I'm not a fan of outsourcing in general, and none of the end users I ever speak to like it either. FDs are usually happy, but no-one else! 😐
All it will do is encourage people to run up large 3g bills at the openzone wireless is so damn horrible.
If you're on BT then you only get x number of minutes free a month on openzone and it will only provide internet access rather than an actual network. Unless you can get in to some sort of partnership agreement with them where you can refine the spec then its a horrible horrible idea 😀
You might as well do it properly and get contractors in with someone who can design a wireless network that will integrate with your network and actually add value to the network. I'd suggest you get some contractors in with CCNP wireless guys that will understand how to actually do that sort of implementation rather than openzone engineers that will be confused as there's no fruit machine to hide the AP behind...
Place I work for does stuff like this, if it's any help. Email me if you want details.
*Wonders if Cougar work for BT open zone *
BT were just an example, we'd actually ask one of our existing telecoms providers to sort this I would imagine.
No connection to our network at all. This is just a service that would be available on site direct to the internet. It fills the needs of our BYOD requests, allows guests to connect to a wireless network without us having to manage it and provides a mobile workforce capability on campus without us having to manage anything.
3G on site for virtually all networks is terrible, hence the requirement for wireless.
I am a wireless consultant at Cisco working on the Olympic Park at he moment, email in profile.
When you say "campus", are you referring to a university/college etc?
If so, you might want to undertake a procurement exercise to make sure you actually get decent value for money.
You might be surprised at some of the figures and services that come back.
"That's a great idea!" he exclaimed, turned his back on us and said [b]'the door's the wooden thing in the wall[/b]"
So he's a proper "next tuesday" then.
*Wonders if Cougar work for BT open zone *
No, I've no real desire to work for BFT.
3g can be sorted with femto or metrocells.
As for outsourcing to BT, its an odd thing that people seem to think that large companies can solve all of their problems, whereas in reality your revenue will be nothing more than a spot on a gnats arse, so when it goes tits up they won't give a monkey's.
Done plenty of large wireless installs, and at the moment on our campus we currently have BT providing wireless in the cafe/restaurant areas for staff, but its not under me as its seperate from the corporate network, so I leave well alone. This will be phased out soon as we come more undeer the US way of doing things.
I know a couple of large entities that have done this. Saves a boat load of cost, hassle and security issues and you use the same old remote access tricks to get people onto the network, only you look at using more seamless authentication methods like corporate issued client certs to seamlessly put people on the network. Also coupled with MDM for 'consumer' devices it provides a simpler way of allowing the devices you issue or trust onto the network whilst keeping the random rooted Android devices on the dirty side. You may end up with productivity issues because users connect their personal devices and mess around on facebook all day (bypassing your internet filtering) but if you have decent phone coverage most people who are predisposed to this will be doing it anyway via 3G.
If on the other hand you want to implement your own APs and infrastructure you could do a lot worse than look at Xirrus - www.xirrus.com.
Thangyaverymuch.
Many thanks.
We've already started looking at providing our own wireless solution and have spent time engaging Cisco and others already. They all cost a lot of money, require a lot of management and business benefits while obvious, are difficult to quantify in a business case. I like the sound of a service on site that I really don't have to concern myself with. If it cocks up then it's a service management issue. This fits in with our IT directors preferred approach as he's a big fan of managed services.
Also, it means users spending all day on Facebook which they'll do anyway won't be using infrastructure I have in place to provide business critical functions.
Finally, it'd effectively be a DR solution should our Internet connectivity experience problems.
Plenty of companies do this, as well as BT. We're working on a large Wifi network in London for the Olympics, should go live in a week or so (with huge PR).
This is an intermediate node. 26 GHz microwave backhaul on the Left, 5.8 GHz Wifi drop link to the street to connect to a 2.4 GHz Wifi mesh.
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Last time I did this we just stuck in an Internet (BT if I remember, but its irrelevent) line with WiFi and left it totally open. In the end we had two lines across our main building.
Pros
No management costs.
£40pcm
No access to internal networks
Cons
No control.
It just worked, which at the time (7 yrs ago) was all we needed.
We needed a quick fix as we were merging and were expecting many 3rd parties etc in the building.