Strategies for showing which members are on-site on a given day?

[Kyle_McLaren]

Hey Alex,

They are cheap, Ubiquity is famous for disruptive pricing. At maximum capacity we hope to have 100 members with 2 AP’s running (may add a third). The AP’s have some nice features like automatic load balancing of traffic and zero-handoff for seamless roaming between AP’s.

The nice thing about UniFi is they have a software controller (as opposed to hardware) that can even run on a cloud server, it’s free as well whereas Cisco etc charge licensing fees for their software.

Time will tell how they perform but reviews have been great. Many people reccomend them over Ruckus for instance and for a coworking facility, you probably don’t need much more.

(I have no affiliation with them

Kyle McLaren

Founder

@EngineroomHQ

···

–

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 5:49 AM, Kyle McLaren [email protected] wrote:

Hi all,

I’m in the process of implementing a technical solution to this for my new coworking space (Engineroom).

We have a Ubiquity UniFi WLAN from which I’m able to get a list of users (through a 3rd party API) who are currently active on the network. This list is then published to a Firebase database and users can then view (in realtime) who is active on the network via a web app that pulls data from Firebase.

Kyle McLaren

Founder

@EngineroomHQ

On Friday, 31 January 2014 01:36:15 UTC+2, Eli Malinsky wrote:

Hey all

Wonder if anyone has novel ways of showing which members are in the space on a given day. Do you use table signs? flags? Pictures? Anything? I’d love to hear any creative ideas.

We’ve tried a few things in the past but nothing’s really stuck. I’d love to hear your experiences, see pics, etc.

thanks!

Eli Malinsky
Centre for Social Innovation
New York // Toronto

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

[Sam_Rosen]

We ran a couple Ubiquity routers at The Coop. They were our saving grace after a bunch of trials with other hardware. We’ve got two AP’s and we have no issues on average managing 200+ connections.
Sam
Desktime powers Coworking.http://desktimeapp.com

···

–

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 5:49 AM, Kyle McLaren [email protected] wrote:

Hi all,

I’m in the process of implementing a technical solution to this for my new coworking space (Engineroom).

We have a Ubiquity UniFi WLAN from which I’m able to get a list of users (through a 3rd party API) who are currently active on the network. This list is then published to a Firebase database and users can then view (in realtime) who is active on the network via a web app that pulls data from Firebase.

Kyle McLaren

Founder

@EngineroomHQ

On Friday, 31 January 2014 01:36:15 UTC+2, Eli Malinsky wrote:

Hey all

Wonder if anyone has novel ways of showing which members are in the space on a given day. Do you use table signs? flags? Pictures? Anything? I’d love to hear any creative ideas.

We’ve tried a few things in the past but nothing’s really stuck. I’d love to hear your experiences, see pics, etc.

thanks!

Eli Malinsky
Centre for Social Innovation
New York // Toronto

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

[alex (Alex Hillman)]

Thanks Kyle!

Do you (or does anyone else on the list) know about a specific place where these APs are in production with 100+ devices connected? One of the things that we learned to account for is that 100 members usually equals 200+ devices (count in mobile phones, tablets, etc.

We did trials with a bunch of options - with an emphasis on the cloud controllers - and found that nobody performed as well as the Ruckus devices in spite of the promises on their websites and from their sales people. We have two Ruckus 7962’s that outperform every other device we tried in production (including Meraki & Cisco hardware, at opposite ends of the price spectrum).

Mind you, the cloud controllers are WAY better than what we have, and man, do I want some of those features. But they don’t matter much when people can’t consistently connect to the AP in the first place. With all of that in mind, I’d replace our Ruckus hardware in a heartbeat if I knew for a fact that we’d get equal or better performance.

So you’ll have to forgive me for being suspicious of the theoretical performance capabilities, and why I’m hungry for more data.

You mentioned reviews - could you point me towards them?

-Alex

···

–

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 12:14 PM, Kyle McLaren [email protected] wrote:

Hey Alex,

They are cheap, Ubiquity is famous for disruptive pricing. At maximum capacity we hope to have 100 members with 2 AP’s running (may add a third). The AP’s have some nice features like automatic load balancing of traffic and zero-handoff for seamless roaming between AP’s.

The nice thing about UniFi is they have a software controller (as opposed to hardware) that can even run on a cloud server, it’s free as well whereas Cisco etc charge licensing fees for their software.

Time will tell how they perform but reviews have been great. Many people reccomend them over Ruckus for instance and for a coworking facility, you probably don’t need much more.

(I have no affiliation with them

Kyle McLaren

Founder

@EngineroomHQ

On Monday, February 10, 2014, Alex Hillman [email protected] wrote:

Those UniFi AP’s look pretty great, but are surprisingly cheap to me compared to the other enterprise options I’ve tested. It says “up to 100 concurrent connections” in the traffic management part, but I’ve learned the hard way that those numbers are usually theoretical How many people do actually you have distributed across each one?

-Alex

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/coworking/S7ZJ7Yf5WHA/unsubscribe.

To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

–

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 5:49 AM, Kyle McLaren [email protected] wrote:

Hi all,

I’m in the process of implementing a technical solution to this for my new coworking space (Engineroom).

We have a Ubiquity UniFi WLAN from which I’m able to get a list of users (through a 3rd party API) who are currently active on the network. This list is then published to a Firebase database and users can then view (in realtime) who is active on the network via a web app that pulls data from Firebase.

Kyle McLaren

Founder

@EngineroomHQ

On Friday, 31 January 2014 01:36:15 UTC+2, Eli Malinsky wrote:

Hey all

Wonder if anyone has novel ways of showing which members are in the space on a given day. Do you use table signs? flags? Pictures? Anything? I’d love to hear any creative ideas.

We’ve tried a few things in the past but nothing’s really stuck. I’d love to hear your experiences, see pics, etc.

thanks!

Eli Malinsky
Centre for Social Innovation
New York // Toronto

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

[jonathan.markwell]

I’ve not got hard data but since we got our UniFi AP Pros I’ve not had to think about WiFi. It’s the only networking hardware I’ve ever had that gets close to an Apple-like Just Works experience.

We regularly have 90+ devices without a problem but we’ve got 3 APs sharing the load - I’ve never stress tested one by itself. They’re such good value and play so well with each other that I get the impression we’d be fine adding more APs if we needed to scale. I understand that among other things regulate their own signal strength so they don’t interfere with each other. They even continued to work without complaint when the controller (an old Mac Mini) was accidentally turned off for a few days.

Jon

···

On 10 February 2014 17:32, Alex Hillman [email protected] wrote:

Thanks Kyle!

Do you (or does anyone else on the list) know about a specific place where these APs are in production with 100+ devices connected? One of the things that we learned to account for is that 100 members usually equals 200+ devices (count in mobile phones, tablets, etc.

We did trials with a bunch of options - with an emphasis on the cloud controllers - and found that nobody performed as well as the Ruckus devices in spite of the promises on their websites and from their sales people. We have two Ruckus 7962’s that outperform every other device we tried in production (including Meraki & Cisco hardware, at opposite ends of the price spectrum).

Mind you, the cloud controllers are WAY better than what we have, and man, do I want some of those features. But they don’t matter much when people can’t consistently connect to the AP in the first place. With all of that in mind, I’d replace our Ruckus hardware in a heartbeat if I knew for a fact that we’d get equal or better performance.

So you’ll have to forgive me for being suspicious of the theoretical performance capabilities, and why I’m hungry for more data.

You mentioned reviews - could you point me towards them?

-Alex

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

–
Jonathan Markwell

Software engineers with startup experience - http://CoderFounders.com

A home for your work in Brighton - http://theSkiff.org

mob: +44 (0)7766 021 485 | tel: +44 (0)1273 252 191
skype: jlmarkwell | twitter: http://twitter.com/jot

–

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 12:14 PM, Kyle McLaren [email protected] wrote:

Hey Alex,

They are cheap, Ubiquity is famous for disruptive pricing. At maximum capacity we hope to have 100 members with 2 AP’s running (may add a third). The AP’s have some nice features like automatic load balancing of traffic and zero-handoff for seamless roaming between AP’s.

The nice thing about UniFi is they have a software controller (as opposed to hardware) that can even run on a cloud server, it’s free as well whereas Cisco etc charge licensing fees for their software.

Time will tell how they perform but reviews have been great. Many people reccomend them over Ruckus for instance and for a coworking facility, you probably don’t need much more.

(I have no affiliation with them

Kyle McLaren

Founder

@EngineroomHQ

On Monday, February 10, 2014, Alex Hillman [email protected] wrote:

Those UniFi AP’s look pretty great, but are surprisingly cheap to me compared to the other enterprise options I’ve tested. It says “up to 100 concurrent connections” in the traffic management part, but I’ve learned the hard way that those numbers are usually theoretical How many people do actually you have distributed across each one?

-Alex

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/coworking/S7ZJ7Yf5WHA/unsubscribe.

To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

–

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 5:49 AM, Kyle McLaren [email protected] wrote:

Hi all,

I’m in the process of implementing a technical solution to this for my new coworking space (Engineroom).

We have a Ubiquity UniFi WLAN from which I’m able to get a list of users (through a 3rd party API) who are currently active on the network. This list is then published to a Firebase database and users can then view (in realtime) who is active on the network via a web app that pulls data from Firebase.

Kyle McLaren

Founder

@EngineroomHQ

On Friday, 31 January 2014 01:36:15 UTC+2, Eli Malinsky wrote:

Hey all

Wonder if anyone has novel ways of showing which members are in the space on a given day. Do you use table signs? flags? Pictures? Anything? I’d love to hear any creative ideas.

We’ve tried a few things in the past but nothing’s really stuck. I’d love to hear your experiences, see pics, etc.

thanks!

Eli Malinsky
Centre for Social Innovation
New York // Toronto

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

[alex (Alex Hillman)]

Awesome feedback guys - thank you!

···

–

/ah
indyhall.org

coworking in philadelphia

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 2:34 PM, Jonathan Markwell [email protected] wrote:

I’ve not got hard data but since we got our UniFi AP Pros I’ve not had to think about WiFi. It’s the only networking hardware I’ve ever had that gets close to an Apple-like Just Works experience.

We regularly have 90+ devices without a problem but we’ve got 3 APs sharing the load - I’ve never stress tested one by itself. They’re such good value and play so well with each other that I get the impression we’d be fine adding more APs if we needed to scale. I understand that among other things regulate their own signal strength so they don’t interfere with each other. They even continued to work without complaint when the controller (an old Mac Mini) was accidentally turned off for a few days.

Jon

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

On 10 February 2014 17:32, Alex Hillman [email protected] wrote:

Thanks Kyle!

Do you (or does anyone else on the list) know about a specific place where these APs are in production with 100+ devices connected? One of the things that we learned to account for is that 100 members usually equals 200+ devices (count in mobile phones, tablets, etc.

We did trials with a bunch of options - with an emphasis on the cloud controllers - and found that nobody performed as well as the Ruckus devices in spite of the promises on their websites and from their sales people. We have two Ruckus 7962’s that outperform every other device we tried in production (including Meraki & Cisco hardware, at opposite ends of the price spectrum).

Mind you, the cloud controllers are WAY better than what we have, and man, do I want some of those features. But they don’t matter much when people can’t consistently connect to the AP in the first place. With all of that in mind, I’d replace our Ruckus hardware in a heartbeat if I knew for a fact that we’d get equal or better performance.

So you’ll have to forgive me for being suspicious of the theoretical performance capabilities, and why I’m hungry for more data.

You mentioned reviews - could you point me towards them?

-Alex

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

–

Jonathan Markwell

Software engineers with startup experience - http://CoderFounders.com

A home for your work in Brighton - http://theSkiff.org

mob: +44 (0)7766 021 485 | tel: +44 (0)1273 252 191

skype: jlmarkwell | twitter: http://twitter.com/jot

–

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 12:14 PM, Kyle McLaren [email protected] wrote:

Hey Alex,

They are cheap, Ubiquity is famous for disruptive pricing. At maximum capacity we hope to have 100 members with 2 AP’s running (may add a third). The AP’s have some nice features like automatic load balancing of traffic and zero-handoff for seamless roaming between AP’s.

The nice thing about UniFi is they have a software controller (as opposed to hardware) that can even run on a cloud server, it’s free as well whereas Cisco etc charge licensing fees for their software.

Time will tell how they perform but reviews have been great. Many people reccomend them over Ruckus for instance and for a coworking facility, you probably don’t need much more.

(I have no affiliation with them

Kyle McLaren

Founder

@EngineroomHQ

On Monday, February 10, 2014, Alex Hillman [email protected] wrote:

Those UniFi AP’s look pretty great, but are surprisingly cheap to me compared to the other enterprise options I’ve tested. It says “up to 100 concurrent connections” in the traffic management part, but I’ve learned the hard way that those numbers are usually theoretical How many people do actually you have distributed across each one?

-Alex

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/coworking/S7ZJ7Yf5WHA/unsubscribe.

To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

–

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 5:49 AM, Kyle McLaren [email protected] wrote:

Hi all,

I’m in the process of implementing a technical solution to this for my new coworking space (Engineroom).

We have a Ubiquity UniFi WLAN from which I’m able to get a list of users (through a 3rd party API) who are currently active on the network. This list is then published to a Firebase database and users can then view (in realtime) who is active on the network via a web app that pulls data from Firebase.

Kyle McLaren

Founder

@EngineroomHQ

On Friday, 31 January 2014 01:36:15 UTC+2, Eli Malinsky wrote:

Hey all

Wonder if anyone has novel ways of showing which members are in the space on a given day. Do you use table signs? flags? Pictures? Anything? I’d love to hear any creative ideas.

We’ve tried a few things in the past but nothing’s really stuck. I’d love to hear your experiences, see pics, etc.

thanks!

Eli Malinsky
Centre for Social Innovation
New York // Toronto

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

[jacobsayles]

This is great information! We are pushing our two Airport Extremes and are starting to look for a more enterprise solution. They have been great, but these days we are averaging 120 devices a day and if I don’t reboot them once a week they stop accepting new connections about Wednesday or Thursday.

···

I wonder if we could get away with only having two of these or if we should get more. Currently we have an Airport on each 5000sqft floor and have plenty of coverage.

Jacob

---

Office Nomads - Individuality without Isolation
http://www.officenomads.com - (206) 323-6500

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 11:34 AM, Jonathan Markwell [email protected] wrote:

I’ve not got hard data but since we got our UniFi AP Pros I’ve not had to think about WiFi. It’s the only networking hardware I’ve ever had that gets close to an Apple-like Just Works experience.

We regularly have 90+ devices without a problem but we’ve got 3 APs sharing the load - I’ve never stress tested one by itself. They’re such good value and play so well with each other that I get the impression we’d be fine adding more APs if we needed to scale. I understand that among other things regulate their own signal strength so they don’t interfere with each other. They even continued to work without complaint when the controller (an old Mac Mini) was accidentally turned off for a few days.

Jon

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

On 10 February 2014 17:32, Alex Hillman [email protected] wrote:

Thanks Kyle!

Do you (or does anyone else on the list) know about a specific place where these APs are in production with 100+ devices connected? One of the things that we learned to account for is that 100 members usually equals 200+ devices (count in mobile phones, tablets, etc.

We did trials with a bunch of options - with an emphasis on the cloud controllers - and found that nobody performed as well as the Ruckus devices in spite of the promises on their websites and from their sales people. We have two Ruckus 7962’s that outperform every other device we tried in production (including Meraki & Cisco hardware, at opposite ends of the price spectrum).

Mind you, the cloud controllers are WAY better than what we have, and man, do I want some of those features. But they don’t matter much when people can’t consistently connect to the AP in the first place. With all of that in mind, I’d replace our Ruckus hardware in a heartbeat if I knew for a fact that we’d get equal or better performance.

So you’ll have to forgive me for being suspicious of the theoretical performance capabilities, and why I’m hungry for more data.

You mentioned reviews - could you point me towards them?

-Alex

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

–
Jonathan Markwell

Software engineers with startup experience - http://CoderFounders.com

A home for your work in Brighton - http://theSkiff.org

mob: +44 (0)7766 021 485 | tel: +44 (0)1273 252 191

skype: jlmarkwell | twitter: http://twitter.com/jot

–

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 12:14 PM, Kyle McLaren [email protected] wrote:

Hey Alex,

They are cheap, Ubiquity is famous for disruptive pricing. At maximum capacity we hope to have 100 members with 2 AP’s running (may add a third). The AP’s have some nice features like automatic load balancing of traffic and zero-handoff for seamless roaming between AP’s.

The nice thing about UniFi is they have a software controller (as opposed to hardware) that can even run on a cloud server, it’s free as well whereas Cisco etc charge licensing fees for their software.

Time will tell how they perform but reviews have been great. Many people reccomend them over Ruckus for instance and for a coworking facility, you probably don’t need much more.

(I have no affiliation with them

Kyle McLaren

Founder

@EngineroomHQ

On Monday, February 10, 2014, Alex Hillman [email protected] wrote:

Those UniFi AP’s look pretty great, but are surprisingly cheap to me compared to the other enterprise options I’ve tested. It says “up to 100 concurrent connections” in the traffic management part, but I’ve learned the hard way that those numbers are usually theoretical How many people do actually you have distributed across each one?

-Alex

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/coworking/S7ZJ7Yf5WHA/unsubscribe.

To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

–

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 5:49 AM, Kyle McLaren [email protected] wrote:

Hi all,

I’m in the process of implementing a technical solution to this for my new coworking space (Engineroom).

We have a Ubiquity UniFi WLAN from which I’m able to get a list of users (through a 3rd party API) who are currently active on the network. This list is then published to a Firebase database and users can then view (in realtime) who is active on the network via a web app that pulls data from Firebase.

Kyle McLaren

Founder

@EngineroomHQ

On Friday, 31 January 2014 01:36:15 UTC+2, Eli Malinsky wrote:

Hey all

Wonder if anyone has novel ways of showing which members are in the space on a given day. Do you use table signs? flags? Pictures? Anything? I’d love to hear any creative ideas.

We’ve tried a few things in the past but nothing’s really stuck. I’d love to hear your experiences, see pics, etc.

thanks!

Eli Malinsky
Centre for Social Innovation
New York // Toronto

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

[Melissa_Mesku]

Wish I had a more technically helpful answer, but as a coworking member, the most impressive solution I’ve seen is at the Grind in NYC. Members there use a card to tap themselves in every day, and photo profiles of all checked-in members appear in a private online directory and elegantly on a large screen in the space. I asked whether they could tell me what they use, but no dice. I might have to challenge one of their people to an arm wrestle.

Melissa

(coworker at New Work City in NYC)

···

On Thursday, January 30, 2014 6:36:15 PM UTC-5, Eli Malinsky wrote:

Hey all

Wonder if anyone has novel ways of showing which members are in the space on a given day. Do you use table signs? flags? Pictures? Anything? I’d love to hear any creative ideas.

We’ve tried a few things in the past but nothing’s really stuck. I’d love to hear your experiences, see pics, etc.

thanks!

Eli Malinsky
Centre for Social Innovation
New York // Toronto

[Thilo]

Hi Jakob,

yes that's sounds like a lot of load for the stations
it's a shot in the dark but maybe you have a to small subnet and the station runs out of IP addresses to assign, that's usally the case when you choose a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.

Cheers
Thilo

[Thilo]

Hi all,

as the subject about getting the wifi right was bought up I like to share my post about getting the wifi right in high density situations that in parts applies to coworking spaces too. I just leave it here — The conference wifi checklist

TL,DR: Unifi is great, use the 5GHz Band

Cheers
Thilo

co.up coworking / cobot.me

···

On Monday, February 10, 2014 9:53:31 PM UTC+1, Melissa Mesku wrote:

Wish I had a more technically helpful answer, but as a coworking member, the most impressive solution I’ve seen is at the Grind in NYC. Members there use a card to tap themselves in every day, and photo profiles of all checked-in members appear in a private online directory and elegantly on a large screen in the space. I asked whether they could tell me what they use, but no dice. I might have to challenge one of their people to an arm wrestle.

Melissa

(coworker at New Work City in NYC)

On Thursday, January 30, 2014 6:36:15 PM UTC-5, Eli Malinsky wrote:

Hey all

Wonder if anyone has novel ways of showing which members are in the space on a given day. Do you use table signs? flags? Pictures? Anything? I’d love to hear any creative ideas.

We’ve tried a few things in the past but nothing’s really stuck. I’d love to hear your experiences, see pics, etc.

thanks!

Eli Malinsky
Centre for Social Innovation
New York // Toronto

[Angel_Kwiatkowski]

Pretty consistently. We obviously don’t have a perfect record, that would be unrealistic. I got a used 1st gen ipad for $50. It’s “vintage” and it’s propped up on a table that you can see as you come in the door. The ipad never rests/sleeps/gets turned off so it’s ALWAYS displayed and visible as people come in. After a few weeks of gentle reminders as people walk in it seems to have stuck.

Angel

···

On Saturday, February 8, 2014 1:53:56 PM UTC-7, Alex Hillman wrote:

Hey Angel, how consistently do people use this form? Any tips?

We’ve played with something like this and found that it’s really, really hard to help people create this habit.

-Alex

–

/ah
indyhall.org

coworking in philadelphia

On Sat, Feb 8, 2014 at 3:50 PM, Angel Kwiatkowski [email protected] wrote:

One of our members designed a simple check-in page from our website so you can be at home and see who’s in the space on a given day. It also flows over into my google analytics so I can see what kind of use we’re getting and if any patterns are emerging. This helps with knowing how many of what types of memberships I can continue to sell. Here’s a link http://coherecommunity.com/checkin-form
Angel

On Thursday, January 30, 2014 4:36:15 PM UTC-7, Eli Malinsky wrote:

Hey all

Wonder if anyone has novel ways of showing which members are in the space on a given day. Do you use table signs? flags? Pictures? Anything? I’d love to hear any creative ideas.

We’ve tried a few things in the past but nothing’s really stuck. I’d love to hear your experiences, see pics, etc.

thanks!

Eli Malinsky
Centre for Social Innovation
New York // Toronto

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

[Angel_Kwiatkowski]

OH! And I explain that their checkins help me figure out how many more memberships I can sell which seems to be motivating because if they don’t check in, I don’t have the right data which can lead to TOO many members and not enough chairs for everyone. That would be a catastrophe!

···

On Saturday, February 8, 2014 1:53:56 PM UTC-7, Alex Hillman wrote:

Hey Angel, how consistently do people use this form? Any tips?

We’ve played with something like this and found that it’s really, really hard to help people create this habit.

-Alex

–

/ah
indyhall.org

coworking in philadelphia

On Sat, Feb 8, 2014 at 3:50 PM, Angel Kwiatkowski [email protected] wrote:

One of our members designed a simple check-in page from our website so you can be at home and see who’s in the space on a given day. It also flows over into my google analytics so I can see what kind of use we’re getting and if any patterns are emerging. This helps with knowing how many of what types of memberships I can continue to sell. Here’s a link http://coherecommunity.com/checkin-form
Angel

On Thursday, January 30, 2014 4:36:15 PM UTC-7, Eli Malinsky wrote:

Hey all

Wonder if anyone has novel ways of showing which members are in the space on a given day. Do you use table signs? flags? Pictures? Anything? I’d love to hear any creative ideas.

We’ve tried a few things in the past but nothing’s really stuck. I’d love to hear your experiences, see pics, etc.

thanks!

Eli Malinsky
Centre for Social Innovation
New York // Toronto

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

[Craig_Plunkett]

At New Work City, we’re using a Meru Networks system ( I’m the territory Sales Engineer ) with a Peplink Balance 300 router and two TWC cable modems. I’m finding that the device to person ratio here is 2+. Over the past year we’ve been peaking at over 110 devices per day. We’ll be adding a couple of 802.11ac access points soon. Now if we could only get fiber in the building. We haven’t implemented a captive portal yet, but without that, it’s tough to get a user count.

···

[Alex_Linsker]

For wifi and AP's: we have 4 AP's and sometimes more than 100 devices. We have a second wifi network for members when desired, it's rarely used but great to have. Stephouse Networks is great, they do full service install and maintenance in Portland Oregon.

Reading the comments above, I was reminded of the old workatjelly.com wiki -- back before New Work City was called that and was Cooper Bricolage, and for Amit Gupta and Luke and other's Jelly coworking, people writing their name, estimated time of arrival and departure, and what we'd each be working on that day, often with a link to a website, was a great way for people to attract other people, a day or a week in advance.

We do that in person now at weekly Lightning Talks: your name, and in 10 seconds or less what are you working on today. (We do that before the talks, it is amazing for bonding.)

Alex Linsker, Collective Agency, Portland Oregon

[Adrian_Palacios]

We usually tackle this in two different steps, one to know who is in and out of the space and another to communicate this to everyone.

In most cases, we rely on members having to _check in and out _somehow so the system knows they are in the space and for how long. This “somehow” is the tricky bit and we find that having several options resulting on a check-in and keeping these as close as possible to the normal use of the space works best. As it was mentioned in this thread, it is no possible to get a 100% accurate number of who was in the space, but you can try to maximize your chances. There are some practices we found to have different degree of success in different spaces depending on how they are run:

• If there is a card system to open the entry door(s), hook this to the checking system, so accessing the space results in the member being checked in. For safety reasons, the members should not be forced to check out to leave the space, but the system can remind members who didn’t check out every midnight. We know of some spaces where this technique has been quite effective.

• If you use a WiFi router supporting Captive Portal, pfSense or RADIUS, hook it to the check-in system, so members are asked for their member login details and checked-in when they connect to the internet. This method also can assume somebody is no longer in the space after they disconnect for a period of time.

• If you have manned front-desk provide a RFID card reader connected to the check-in system, so members can check in and out from there too. Reminders can also be sent to members who checked-in but didn’t check out.
  In general the less intrusive the better results you should get but assume there will be a bit of an education process at first.

The second issue is how to display who in the space. For this case we merged this info with the members directory. The home page of the space website shows a random selection of who is the space, the picture of each person and access to their profile and social and contact details. The full directory of members can also be filtered to show just who is in the space at that moment and checked-in members are highlighted in the list in case you just want to browse around the directory and find someone to talk to

If you want to go a step further, there is also the option to access that data using an public API, which will let you display the images and/or profiles of each member checked in in a TV screen, tablet or any device able to make a request over the internet, so that opens up a good range of options.

The idea is basically to have a range of options for members to check in, but all resulting in a single system knowing if the member is in the space or not. You can then use this to show who is in the space, run occupancy reports, billing, etc…

Adrian

···

On Thursday, January 30, 2014 11:36:15 PM UTC, Eli Malinsky wrote:

Hey all

Wonder if anyone has novel ways of showing which members are in the space on a given day. Do you use table signs? flags? Pictures? Anything? I’d love to hear any creative ideas.

We’ve tried a few things in the past but nothing’s really stuck. I’d love to hear your experiences, see pics, etc.

thanks!

Eli Malinsky
Centre for Social Innovation
New York // Toronto

[te1]

I was doing other research here and came across these Unifi posts… We’ve been using Unifi APs for a while now with good results. But we’re only using them for 5ghz. We had issues running them on both 2+5 simultaneously so left the old 2ghz APs running. But I think those issues were more related to a couple misbehaving 2ghz devices. We have 3 APs running on 5ghz sharing a load of no more than 30 devices each AP. The central management interface is nice - basic, but nice to see all the wireless activity from different APs in one screen.

If you run 5ghz and 2ghz, I would suggest having a separate SSID for 5ghz. Letting devices and APs try to negotiate which freq to use doesn’t produce the best results. Essentially all of our members with Macs are on the 5G (75%) while the PCs and other devices are all on 2G (separate APs).

For the techies, they do run linux and you can get access to the command line (minimally). Usually one AP does need a hard reboot every other week. But that’s probably because we’re running the beta software (and/or we have a lot of weird client devices that sometimes cause issues for us).

Zero handoff feature was mentioned in another post. Note that you probably won’t be able to use it in a complex, busy, or high capacity environment due to serious limitations in how zero handoff works (all APs must operate on the same channel, etc). Too bad because it sounded cool. But our testing showed it didn’t work very well yet and had those significant implementation restrictions. I will say though that regular handoff with unifi works pretty well - certainly better than our other APs.

In our case the APs are only APs. All other network management tricks are done in the core routers/firewalls.

Cheers, m.

···

On Tuesday, February 11, 2014 3:34:18 AM UTC+8, @jot wrote:

I’ve not got hard data but since we got our UniFi AP Pros I’ve not had to think about WiFi. It’s the only networking hardware I’ve ever had that gets close to an Apple-like Just Works experience.

We regularly have 90+ devices without a problem but we’ve got 3 APs sharing the load - I’ve never stress tested one by itself. They’re such good value and play so well with each other that I get the impression we’d be fine adding more APs if we needed to scale. I understand that among other things regulate their own signal strength so they don’t interfere with each other. They even continued to work without complaint when the controller (an old Mac Mini) was accidentally turned off for a few days.

Jon

On 10 February 2014 17:32, Alex Hillman [email protected] wrote:

Thanks Kyle!

Do you (or does anyone else on the list) know about a specific place where these APs are in production with 100+ devices connected? One of the things that we learned to account for is that 100 members usually equals 200+ devices (count in mobile phones, tablets, etc.

We did trials with a bunch of options - with an emphasis on the cloud controllers - and found that nobody performed as well as the Ruckus devices in spite of the promises on their websites and from their sales people. We have two Ruckus 7962’s that outperform every other device we tried in production (including Meraki & Cisco hardware, at opposite ends of the price spectrum).

Mind you, the cloud controllers are WAY better than what we have, and man, do I want some of those features. But they don’t matter much when people can’t consistently connect to the AP in the first place. With all of that in mind, I’d replace our Ruckus hardware in a heartbeat if I knew for a fact that we’d get equal or better performance.

So you’ll have to forgive me for being suspicious of the theoretical performance capabilities, and why I’m hungry for more data.

You mentioned reviews - could you point me towards them?

-Alex

–

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 12:14 PM, Kyle McLaren [email protected] wrote:

Hey Alex,

They are cheap, Ubiquity is famous for disruptive pricing. At maximum capacity we hope to have 100 members with 2 AP’s running (may add a third). The AP’s have some nice features like automatic load balancing of traffic and zero-handoff for seamless roaming between AP’s.

The nice thing about UniFi is they have a software controller (as opposed to hardware) that can even run on a cloud server, it’s free as well whereas Cisco etc charge licensing fees for their software.

Time will tell how they perform but reviews have been great. Many people reccomend them over Ruckus for instance and for a coworking facility, you probably don’t need much more.

(I have no affiliation with them

Kyle McLaren

Founder

@EngineroomHQ

On Monday, February 10, 2014, Alex Hillman [email protected] wrote:

Those UniFi AP’s look pretty great, but are surprisingly cheap to me compared to the other enterprise options I’ve tested. It says “up to 100 concurrent connections” in the traffic management part, but I’ve learned the hard way that those numbers are usually theoretical How many people do actually you have distributed across each one?

-Alex

–

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 5:49 AM, Kyle McLaren [email protected] wrote:

Hi all,

I’m in the process of implementing a technical solution to this for my new coworking space (Engineroom).

We have a Ubiquity UniFi WLAN from which I’m able to get a list of users (through a 3rd party API) who are currently active on the network. This list is then published to a Firebase database and users can then view (in realtime) who is active on the network via a web app that pulls data from Firebase.

Kyle McLaren

Founder

@EngineroomHQ

On Friday, 31 January 2014 01:36:15 UTC+2, Eli Malinsky wrote:

Hey all

Wonder if anyone has novel ways of showing which members are in the space on a given day. Do you use table signs? flags? Pictures? Anything? I’d love to hear any creative ideas.

We’ve tried a few things in the past but nothing’s really stuck. I’d love to hear your experiences, see pics, etc.

thanks!

Eli Malinsky
Centre for Social Innovation
New York // Toronto

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/coworking/S7ZJ7Yf5WHA/unsubscribe.

To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

–

Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com

---

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Coworking” group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

–
Jonathan Markwell

Software engineers with startup experience - http://CoderFounders.com

A home for your work in Brighton - http://theSkiff.org

mob: +44 (0)7766 021 485 | tel: +44 (0)1273 252 191
skype: jlmarkwell | twitter: http://twitter.com/jot