How to build a Wireless Network for School Canteen using tp-link products

Nowadays, more and more schools have the need to build up their own Canteens. When students waiting in line to get their food or eating, they would use smart phones to surf the internet and some may even use laptop. So if school could deploy wireless networks that would improve satisfaction of the students. What’s more, school may also publish announcements through wireless network.

What are the basic needs of school canteen wireless network?

A school canteen wireless network should meet the following needs:

1、Wireless network could cover all the store without any dead corner.

2、Auto switch access point when students are moving, network keeps fluent.

3、It is crowded when students eat lunch, so it requires that AP could support more clients and Load Balance feature.

4、Concise layout, good looking, PoE supported, and easy to install.

5、It needs all APs could be managed & configured uniformly. And just use one controller could monitor the whole APs and give a feedback.

What kind of solution can meet the needs of school canteen wireless network?

Topology

Tips for deploying this network topology:

When starting to deploy the wireless AP, the positions to deploy the AP and the amount needed depends on the signal strength and the interference. The result is always different due to different environment, so it is strongly suggested to deploy the AP and adjust the transmit power and signal channel after a professional field measurement. Normally the three points below should be mainly considered:

Transmit Power and Coverage

The coverage of an AP is limited, but we can fine adjust it by the transmit power. As the limitation of the lobe pattern of the celling mount AP, one AP can cover 10-14 meter. While a real coverage deployment should be decided after the field measurement.

Signal Channel Distributing

Another factor must be considered in wireless network deployment is channel collision. All over the 13 channels in 2.4GHz frequency range, only 3 channels won’t overlap each other, which are channel 1, 6, 11. To avoid channel collision, we should choose channel 1, 6, 11 and place them alternately.

Clients number

The AP should have the ability to carry all the clients in its coverage in the dormitory.

One of the schematic diagram shows as below:

What are the highlights of this solution?

Easy to deploy

The EAP is ceiling mount designed with beautiful appearance. It supports PoE standard so that could be deployed easily.

Auto roaming

EAP Controller could manage many EAPs with the same SSID, clients would switch to the other EAPs automatically when they come near the other EAPs.

High availability

Support Load Balance that could restrict the maximum number of the clients connected to one signal EAP to avoid overload; Support Band Steering that could lead the clients connect to 5G network. Support Airtime fairness that could improve the whole network throughput.

High development

Support radius, portal, voucher authentication and so on. And it could work with the external portal server and external certificate server.

Easy to manage

No need to buy the expensive hardware AC. All the EAP could be centralized managed by a free EAP controller software. All the EAP status can be monitored on the web GUI of the controller.

Which product should I choose to build this school canteen wireless network?

Here is a list which includes the TP-LINK devices for reference:

Type	Model	Brief Introduction
High performance solution	TL-ER6120	Support Intelligent Load Balance, Policy Routing and Link Backup IPsec VPN、PPTP VPN、L2TP VPN Abundant security features including ARP Inspection, DoS Defense, URL/Keyword Domain Filter and Access Control
	T2700G-28TQ	True Physical Stacking technology supports up to 8 units and 320Gbps backplane bandwidth for high scalability and efficient redundancy Support Static Routing and VLAN Complete safety protection strategy Support Access Control
	TL-SG3424P	Supports 24 802.3at/af-compliant POE+ ports with a total power supply of 320W Support Access Control and VLAN IP-MAC-Port-VID Binding, ACL, Port Security, DoS Defend, Storm control, DHCP Snooping, 802.1X Authentication and Radius provide you robust security strategies
	EAP330	Speeds of up to 1.9Gbps over concurrent dual band 802.11ac Wi-Fi with MIMO and Turbo QAM technologies Airtime Fairness, Beamforming, and Band Steering Technologies guarantee optimal RF performance for business-level applications Link aggregation joins two gigabit Ethernet ports to break the bottleneck in network backhaul capacity Power over Ethernet (802.3at) support and simple mounting design allow for flexible deployment and convenient installation
Cost effective solution	TL-ER5120	Support Intelligent Load Balance, Policy Routing and Link Backup Abundant security features including ARP Inspection, DoS Defense, URL/Keyword Domain Filter and Access Control
	T1600G-28TS	True Physical Stacking technology supports up to 8 units and 320Gbps backplane bandwidth for high scalability and efficient redundancy Support Static Routing and VLAN Complete safety protection strategy Support Access Control
	TL-SG1008PE	Equipped with 8 PoE+ supported ports to transfer data and power over a single cable Plug and play design, no configuration required
	EAP220	Power over Ethernet (802.3af) support and simple mounting design allow for flexible deployment and convenient installation Captive portal provides one convenient method of authentication for Wi-Fi guests WPA/WPA2-enterprise, 802.1X with RADIUS secure authentication and rogue access point detection ensure the security of WLAN Gigabit Ethernet port enables bandwidth-intensive application or multimedia transferring