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Planning your organization's Wi-Fi
infrastructure
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If your organization plans to use Wi-Fi® enabled BlackBerry® devices for making and taking BlackBerry® Mobile Voice
System calls, you must make sure that your Wi-Fi infrastructure can support Voice over Wi-Fi calls. During the planning
process, you should collaborate with your organization's Wi-Fi infrastructure vendor to make sure that the Wi-Fi
infrastructure is designed and configured to support Voice over Wi-Fi calls.
To make sure that your organization's Wi-Fi infrastructure can support Voice over Wi-Fi calls, you should use
BlackBerry devices to perform an in-depth site survey. For more information, visit www.blackberry.com/support to
read article KB13299. The results of the survey should permit you to perform the following tasks:
• design and configure a Wi-Fi controller-based architecture
• identify the type of authentication and level of encryption that your organization requires
• configure a QoS implementation
• determine the expected Wi-Fi coverage and capacity boundaries of the access points
• determine the capacity of your organization's Wi-Fi infrastructure. Make sure that you account for the expected
usage for both BlackBerry MVS users and individuals who use Wi-Fi technology on their laptop computers.
• create documentation for your organization's users to help them configure their devices to connect to Wi-Fi
networks and make Voice over Wi-Fi calls
Best practice: Planning your organization's Wi-Fi
infrastructure
The following guidelines are intended to help you design a Wi-Fi infrastructure that permits BlackBerry devices to
connect to an access point that has a medium-to-high data rate. When the data rate of the access point is too low
or the signal strength of the access point is too weak, the device should roam to an access point with a higher data
rate or a stronger signal strength. When designing your organization's Wi-Fi infrastructure, you should consider the
following guidelines:
• Establish a minimum signal strength level of -65 dBm in the planned coverage area.
• Establish a minimum SNR of 25 dB in the planned coverage area.
• When roaming in the planned coverage area, make sure that it takes no longer than 50 milliseconds to perform
an access point to access point handoff.
• Eliminate any 802.11b-only devices and the associated data rates. By eliminating the 802.11b-only devices,
802.11g devices do not need to enter protection mode, which reduces the maximum data throughput of the
devices.
Using Wi-Fi enabled BlackBerry devices for making and taking BlackBerry MVS calls from a home office or a hotspot
is unpredictable because of the instability of those types of networks and cannot be expected to be as reliable as
when the user is in a controlled environment. If your organization's users make Voice over Wi-Fi calls from a home
office or hotspot, you must make sure that the integrated VPN client on their BlackBerry devices is configured for a
highly secure connection to your organization's network through the Internet.
Planning Guide
Planning your organization's Wi-Fi infrastructure
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