Sniff Wi-Fi

Far be it from me to hate on a Wi-Fi vendor... ...but seeing Cisco's Wi-Fi recommendations for iPhones (and other Apple iOS devices) has led me to wonder whether The Cisco (Kid) is a Friend of Mine. Cisco released a Best Practices doc for supporting iPhones, iPads, et al. back in November.  For whatever reason I missed it back then.  I'm bringing it up now because Keith Parsons had something about it on his Twitter feed and Ekahau has a webinar coming up on designing a Wi-Fi network for iOS devices.   I am happy that Cisco is bringing up the topic of device-centric Wi-Fi design.  Wi-Fi is (or, at least, should be) all about the end user, and device-centric design implicitly acknowledges this. I am less happy at several of Cisco's actual recommendations.  They seem to have fallen into the trap of believing (or, more perhaps more accurately, leading) the Latest Trendy Wi-Fi Disease, throughputitis .   Throughputitis , as you all ...

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...