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Ubertechs go Skydiving!

by Mike on August 23, 2010

Well not quite, but it got your attention!

Last week we were called to fit a small Meraki network at the local Black Knights Parachute Centre. We installed a single Meraki Outdoor Unit configured with two networks. One is a public network with a hotspot & billing enabled, the other is configured to allow access to the local network for staff or pilots. The Meraki Outdoor Unit is a weatherproof unit which is able to be powered over it’s network cable as we did here.

All the billing and configuration of the unit is setup via the Meraki cloud controller, making it easy to monitor and setup the Meraki mesh units. If in future the Black Knights would like to expand the network to cover other areas, this is as easy as adding a second unit. Only power is required for this unit, no network cable is needed. The network is picked up from the first unit seen below.

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Keeping campers happy with Wi-Fi!

by Mike on August 18, 2010

Last week we were called in to install a wireless network at a small caravan site near Lancaster. The owner wanted a solution for his caravan customers so they could get Internet access from their caravans. Meraki equipment makes setting up a ‘hotspot’ like this very easy. We decided to use the Meraki Outdoor Unit, which is a weatherproof wireless mesh access point and repeater. It only needs a single ethernet cable to provide the uplink, in this case from a BT Businesshub, the power is also sent down the same cable.

We mounted the unit on an adjacent building to the caravans, the owner had kindly installed the Cat 5e cable which we terminated and connected to the Meraki Outdoor and to the BT router at the other end.

We had previously configured the wireless network with billing and appropriate network name (SSID), this is all done using the Meraki cloud controller and makes setup and subsequent monitoring a breeze. Once we had installed the unit we did a walk test round the site and got excellent signals in the required areas.

All in all a great install and we were blessed by some great weather! Next we will be reaching for the sky as we setup another Meraki unit for a local parachuting company, watch this space.


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Improved 802.11n range.

by Mike on August 16, 2010

As you know from a previous blog entry we use a Meraki MR11 wireless access point in the Ubertechs workshop, well what other brand would we use?! The MR11 is a single radio 802.11n high performance wireless mesh access point, as such it gives greater throughput and better range than 802.11b/g.

My mobile smartphone, a HTC Desire, had recently received an updated to Android 2.2, amongst other things this included enabling the wireless radio in the phone to work at 802.11n. To my surprise today I was able to receive the signal from our wireless network whilst visiting a customer in the same building as our workshop but 3 floors below! We are  not talking wooden floors here either, these are pretty heavy duty concrete floors.

I then visited the cafe onsite, which is even further away from our workshop, I don’t even get a mobile signal down there. To my surprise I was still picking up the Meraki access point in our workshop! I was able to do a speedtest and acheived a pretty decent throughput!

So if your in any doubt as to whether you should go with 802.11n to give you better performance and range – don’t hesitate, just make sure it says Meraki on the box!

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Simple and inexpensive wireless networking.

by Mike on August 8, 2010

Simple and inexpensive are two words you would not normally associate with a centrally managed and controlled wireless network solution. However Meraki of California produce both affordable and easy to manage wireless mesh networking equipment.
Meraki use a unique cloud based management system which makes setup, monitoring and subsequent control of your wireless networks almost too easy!

All that is required to get your Meraki wireless network running is to:

  • Plug the wireless access point in to your LAN
  • Create a cloud controller account at meraki.com
  • Login to it and configure any options you require

That’s it!
Of course if you wish you can delve in deeper and setup things like a wireless hotspot with billing, various security settings, bandwidth settings etc.
The Enterprise version of Meraki allows you to setup group policies, 802.1X authentication, add maps & floorplans to your network schematics and monitor for rogue wireless access points, Quality of Service and much more.

Meraki access points start at £119 +vat. Please contact Ubertechs in Lancaster for further information.

Geeks Guide to Butlins.

August 6, 2010

Recently our family went on a short break to Butlins in Bognor Regis on the south coast. I thought it might be useful if I wrote a short blog post on some of the more geeky aspects of our stay!
We’d been a few years ago, stopping in the Shoreline Hotel and our children had enjoyed [...]

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Chrome to Phone an Excellent Android feature.

August 6, 2010

I recently updated my HTC Desire phone to the new Android version 2.2, also known as Froyo, short for Frozen Yoghurt. All the Android releases are currently named after confectionery, Doughnut, Eclair, Cupcake – in case you were wondering!

One of the really useful new features of Android 2.2 which I have found is the ‘Chrome to Phone‘ or [...]

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The Meraki Outdoor Unit.

July 14, 2010

Excellent news, this morning the Meraki Outdoor Unit we ordered for testing and demonstrations yesterday has arrived.
It comes packaged in a nice Meraki box with some cute little birds on the front, signifying that it is for outdoor use I guess.
On the back is a picture of a city skyline with little green dots showing positions of [...]

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Meraki Outdoor Unit on it’s way!

July 12, 2010

Today we ordered one of the Meraki Outdoor Units. This will be for general testing and demonstration purposes. All being well it should be here in time for my site visit/demo tomorrow morning. Watch this space!

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Advantages of the Meraki Cloud Controller.

July 7, 2010

The Meraki wireless mesh equipment is controlled by a ‘cloud’ controller. Unlike other more traditional wireless vendors such as Cisco and Aruba, their is no expensive controller hardware to install and maintain on your site.  This means updates to your wireless network can be pushed out without your intervention should you wish. Meraki can provide [...]

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Meraki Mesh on the Field.

July 3, 2010

Today I thought it would be fun to have a walk to the field near our house and see if we could pick up the wireless network from the antenna you see above. It’s a flat panel type aerial with about 16dbi of gain. Feeding this via a length of Andrews LDF-450 coaxial cable is [...]

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