Alternative to Mitel WLAN adapters for 53** & 69** series

[SharlotD]

Hi

Just wondering if anyone had any recommendations for an alternative to the Mitel WLAN adapters?

The supply chain for these has been a nightmare this year. Since march there have been periods of up to three months where you can't buy them because they're on back order. They simply can't keep up with demand.


To be fair I do deploy upto 10 of these a week so we have a fairly high turnover. I've completely exhausted the refurb market contacts and euro ones. Only ones I can get my hands on until late Dec / early Jan are the odd one or two units at a 100-300% markup!


Running a 50m patch lead is not an option for us unfortunately, its wireless only.

So just wondering if anyone could suggest some alternatives either tried and tested (or just in theory I'm willing to buy some and do some experimenting)

[lundah]

Any wireless bridge & a 802.3af compliant PoE injector should work, but those are in short supply as well.

[SharlotD]

Any wireless bridge & a 802.3af compliant PoE injector should work, but those are in short supply as well.

Thanks for the reply!

You can say that again! ANYTHING PoE is suddenly a hot commodity, I never thought in my life that I would ever have to hunt for PSUs and 4 port switches!

If you dont mine me asking, could I further pick your brains?

Both the 69 and 53 series (the majority of them anyway) have two ethernet ports and one designated power adaptor connector. Which would you say would be the best configuration? Either

- Parralel wired: wireless bridge patched into one of the ethernet ports, with a PSU plugged in the power supply port /  PoE injector in the secondary ethernet port

- Series wired: wireless bridge patched in to the PoE (or vise versa dependin on whether the bride supports PoE), then patched into the ethernet port

[acejavelin]

The short supply of PoE stuff is not new, it's been that way since April-May of this year when it became obvious this wasn't going to be a couple weeks or a month long ordeal, but was going to go on for some time. Many vendors bought up hundreds of PoE injectors at that time, I know we did.

I am confused what you are trying to do here... If you want to use more than one phone on a single bridge, get a small PoE switch, you can usually get 4-8 port PoE switch for less than the price of a few injectors and then it will be much simpler. Also, do not chain phones one behind another, power supply or not, it can cause odd behavior sometimes.

[lundah]

If you want to run multiple phones, do as suggested and buy a 4 or 8 port PoE switch. I run 3-4 phones at a time just fine off a Netgear 6150 extender and a cheap TP-Link 8 port POE switch.

[Dogbreath]

You can power a Mikrotik cAP AC + a handset from a single PoE injector, using the POE passthrough on the cAP AC [the specs say that it's Passive POE out but I can confirm that it powers a 53xx].
A ceiling-mount AP probably isn't really the right form factor for this, however, and it is a little expensive.