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 ...

If there's one thing we've learned about WiFi over the years, it's that problems get fixed.  Site surveys used to be sooo annoying.  So we got controllers with auto-RF.  Guests used to complain and complain that we didn't have WiFi for them.  So we got captive portals.  And so the worl-- Wait a minute.  Auto-RF really doesn't work and we still need site surveys.  And captive portals annoy our friends in desktop support as much as they annoy our guests, plus they drag down overall WiFi performance.  Hmmm...  Let's start over: If there's one thing that we've learned about WiFi over the years, it's that sometimes what seems like a good solution to a problem only ends up making things worse.   Which brings us to our latest solution-that-only-makes-things-worse: Dual-radio APs with band-selectable radios. A little background: Last week, I was sitting in an office, minding my own business when I got a call.  A friend of mine wh...