Wi-Fi inside Climate cells, sure!

NPEC is a research company that finished its new research facility to do “eco-phenotyping” Within this facility, there are 5 controlled climate cells. Inside the cells, they study the effect of plants grown under different climate conditions. They asked us to install Wi-Fi for their new building (see picture below).

The building looks like this see the red borders are the 5 climate cells.

The requirements

2,4Ghz and 5Ghz coverage in all climate cells minimum 25Mbit data transfer.
50 people inside the big room with a laptop 2ss. 2,4Ghz is not required there, laptops usage is 4Mbps continues data. Furthermore, 10 employees are spread across the building. The RSSI was based on a hand scanner with a -10dBm difference from the Ekahau SideKick device. The vendor needed to be Cisco

Here is a real-world impression from the 4 climate cells (one was  on my right that is not on the picture)

Here I highlighted the RF on individual Access-Points so you can see good how dense these climate walls are. The wall attenuation is high and of course, its made of iron at the outside edge to improve cooling and heating. 

So the only way we can offer Wi-Fi inside these cells is inside the cell.

Inside the climate cell, you see the Antenna where the red arrow is pointing at.
It’s a Ventev antenna M602504003D402MWE / a 4dBi gain micro patch antenna.

We used a Cisco 9120AXE to add the back of the cell.

Below I illustrate the coverage overview per Access-point, in the big room (in blue) was a 9120AXI (Omni) installed, and in the hallway, we used a 9120AXE with a 2566P4W patch Antenna to cover the entrance. For coverage the AP inside the blue areas would do the job okay within -67dBm at the edge, but we needed to design for the situation the blue room was fully occupied and still, people working around us needed that extra radio.

Capacity health, note that we counted 10 employees outside the big room (blue spot above).