Voice over IP works great over WiFi like I’ve blogged before. If you’re in an office and need to have Wifi coverage for only a small area, pretty much any WiFi access point (WAP) works. When you start considering covering an entire campus or several acres of property with a signal, you have to have specific equipment in place.

There are many manufacturers that make WAPs that can be configured in a mesh configuration, Aruba, Cisco, Orinoco and Juniper come to mind, but these are all high dollar WAPs. When you’re on a budget, look no further than companies providing devices for small/home business, like D-Link and Netgear. Netgear actually uses technology licensed from Aruba, but I’m not a big fan of Netgear, I’ve had too many bad experiences with their products.

D-Link makes both indoor and outdoor devices that can be used in a variety of configurations including Wireless Distribution System (WDS). -Link’s DWL line of WAPs, specifically DWL-8200AP, DWL-3200AP, DWL-7700AP and DWL-2700AP do a great job of covering your campus in a wireless mesh.

It’s always a good idea to not have too many wireless hops, use hard links via cable whenever possible to keep you latency low. If you need to deploy a large number of WAPs (I’m talking about 500) then it’s always a good idea to go with a company that specializes in this area like Aruba. As the number of WAPs increases, so does the need for a better management solution.

I’ll blog about management solutions and interfaces in another blog.