Sniff Wi-Fi

What does Bluetooth have to do with 5 GHz Wi-Fi?  Nothing.  Bluetooth operates in the 2.4 GHz frequency band. If you look in the right spot, however, Bluetooth can teach you something about 5 GHz Wi-Fi.  Specifically, the Bluetooth 5.0 specification can teach you that Dual 5 GHz access points are a bad idea. This blog's opposition to Dual 5 GHz access points (APs) is not news to long time readers.  The ' Two Radios Are Better Than One (Unless They're Both 5 GHz) ' blog post, which details how Dual 5 GHz APs (like Cisco 3800 Series APs , for example) make enterprise Wi-Fi less stable, is nearly three years old.  Today's re-stating of the pitfalls of dual 5 GHz radio APs is due to something I uncovered while reading about Bluetooth.  I was reading the Bluetooth 5.0 specification in search of anything that might affect Wi-Fi when I happened upon this table: The middle rows of the table is most dramatic, showing that out-of-band RF activity can ...

Spec-ing the Layers with WiSpy (one time, one time) Channel gone red with this stream (two times, two times) Killing my channel with this song Killing my WiFi With this song Taking my WiFi With this stream Killing my WiFi With Bluetooth spe-ee-ee-eeakers... Wireless streaming (music, video or, in the case of the wonderful song referenced above, a music video ) can sure kill a WiFi connection.  It's good to have a spectrum analyzer to identify the problem.  It's even better to remember to use it. Wireless streaming devices are popular nowadays, but most of them are benign.  An AppleTV, for instance, can wirelessly stream audio and video or it can act as a mirroring device for whatever audio or video is on your smartphone, tablet or laptop.  (And mirroring is tougher on WiFi than basic streaming.  When I mirror my iPhone 5, I'm creating three streams.  One from my wireless router to my phone for the Internet stream, a second from my phone back ...