Wireless network in commercial office

My office is in a commercial building shared by several dozens of
tenants, many with their own wireless networks. We have a wireless
network in place which, until the last several months, has worked well.
The performance of our network (ability to connect to the WAP and the
quality of the signal) has steadily degraded to the point where it is
now virtually useless.

My IT guy is telling me that with the volume of WAP's in the building
and likelihood that many are using the same wireless channel, we are
essentially stepping on each others toes, so to speak. He says that
the only solution he can think of is to coordinate a building-wide
wireless plan which would space the channel designation out across the
various floors. Does this sound reasonable to anyone here? Are other
possibly solutions recommended? With the growth of wireless networks I
just can't believe that we're the first to come across this problem, if
it exists.

Any help is appreciated.

Rich

The Richmeister wrote:
> My office is in a commercial building shared by several dozens of
> tenants, many with their own wireless networks. We have a wireless
> network in place which, until the last several months, has worked well.
> The performance of our network (ability to connect to the WAP and the
> quality of the signal) has steadily degraded to the point where it is
> now virtually useless.
>
> My IT guy is telling me that with the volume of WAP's in the building
> and likelihood that many are using the same wireless channel, we are
> essentially stepping on each others toes, so to speak. He says that
> the only solution he can think of is to coordinate a building-wide
> wireless plan which would space the channel designation out across the
> various floors. Does this sound reasonable to anyone here? Are other
> possibly solutions recommended? With the growth of wireless networks I
> just can't believe that we're the first to come across this problem, if
> it exists.

Sounds like you've got a good IT guy. Of the available 11 channels
(assuming you're in the U.S., somewhere like Reedsport, OR), only 3 are
non-overlapping, so if you have a neighbor on each side of you, it'd be
a good idea to use ch 1 at one office, channel 6 in the middle, ch 11 in
the last. That can be in vertical space or horizontal space. That's
simplistic, but you get the idea. If anyone uses other frequencies
besides 2.4GHz that would help alleviate the problem as well. There's
other techniques to fine tune, but channel assignment is a good start.