Sniff Wi-Fi

Device vendor secrecy makes Wi-Fi worse for users. "Wi-Fi is all about the users."  It's my Pinned Tweet  and my professional operating philosophy.  I don't care about AP vendor preference or network management or heatmaps or anything else that doesn't improve the user experience.  I want every device for every user to work everywhere at all times, period.  That's the goal. It is frustrating to me, therefore, that Wi-Fi device makers are so tight with their information.  I've gotten a lot of blowback for my writing and Tweeting about what a mistake it is to set the Minimum Basic Rate (MBR) above 6 Mbps .  Most of it is balderdash from BS artists and other people who don't know Wi-Fi.  A not insignificant amount, however, is from people who know Wi-Fi, at least to some degree.  And the common refrain from those people can be summarized thusly: "Wi-Fi devices use more than just RSSI to determine when to roam."  Maybe things have change

One of my favorite things to do is teach Wi-Fi, and one of my favorite tools for teaching is Savvius  OmniPeek .  The good folks at Savvius were nice enough to provide OmniPeek for the Wi-Fi classes I oversee at Global Knowledge , and so I want to offer a taste of how OmniPeek can be used to learn about Wi-Fi device behavior, specifically with the iPhone X. Savvius OmniPeek is what I call a hardcore protocol analyzer.  The "hardcore" adjective comes from the fact that OmniPeek encourages the user to view frame (aka "packet") traces.  Non-hardcore protocol analyzers focus on providing statistics and graphs.  I am a big fan of all types of protocol analyzers, but the beauty of OmniPeek is that it offers options for viewing statistics and graphs, while making its frame traces simple to navigate. One of the things I like using OmniPeek for when teaching is illustrating the different ways that Wi-Fi devices and APs use the 802.11 standard.  An example is what happen

The last Sniff Wi-Fi post; on why Wi-Fi professionals should stop disabling low data rates, was met some resistance.  Be it in the comments  or  on Twitter , several experienced Wi-Fi folks disagreed. All arguments in favor of disabling low rates  (the ones that were presented to me, at least) were refuted in the text of the Leave, Leave, Leave My Rates Alone blog post.  But text is a less accessible messaging method.  "A picture is worth a thousand words", as the old saying goes. If pictures will get the message across better, then pictures are what I'll use.  What follows is an illustrated look at why disabling low data rates is a bad idea. It's gauche to begin an illustrated work with text, but to understand the problem with disabling low Wi-Fi data rates one must first accept some facts about Wi-Fi devices (smartphones, laptops, etc.): 1. Wi-Fi devices -- not APs -- control associations and roaming. 2. Wi-Fi devices roam based on low received signal str