IETF attendees reengineer their hotel's Wi-Fi network

Re:IETF attendees reengineer their hotel's Wi-Fi network by fr0sty on Thursday March 29, 2012 @12:58PM (#3771916)

One interesting fact (which is not quite intuitive) is that one way they improved the WiFi network performance was by disabling the radios on a number of the access points in the hotel.

Less is more in some circumstances.

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Re:IETF attendees reengineer their hotel's Wi-Fi network by brianpan on Thursday March 29, 2012 @02:53PM (#3772520)

Along with that, they decreased transmit power which also helped reduce interference.

And later they increased interference, in order to add a 4th channel.

It's all about tradeoffs...that's why they pay engineers the (market-competitive) bucks.

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Re:IETF attendees reengineer their hotel's Wi-Fi network by fennecfoxen on Thursday March 29, 2012 @05:21PM (#3773184)

Alternatively, just buy something with features like Aruba's "adaptive radio management" (ARM) that does things like this automagically: http://www.arubanetworks.com/products/arubaos/adaptive-radio...

(pretty sure Cisco has an equivalent but I forget its name...)

Postscript: They talk about HP buying Colubris, but don't think the Colubris-legacy equipment is current-HP stuff; they went and bought 3Com in 2010, and I think that's where most of their current offerings come from.

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Re:IETF attendees reengineer their hotel's Wi-Fi network by smutticus on Thursday March 29, 2012 @06:36PM (#3773478)

Motorola has something called Smart RF which is the same thing. Since ExtremeNetworks and Brocade OEM the Motorola kit all 3 have it. I imagine all major vendors have this now.

But you will never be able to completely remove the human from the equation. A proper wireless site survey with someone walking around and taking readings pre/post AP installation is really the best way to do things. I'm not really a WLAN guy but I work with some really bright people who are. There is a lot of depth to this problem that we should not expect to be solved anytime soon by AI.

If you're interested in some of the theory about applying AI to RF determination check out the work of Tim Brown http://ecee.colorado.edu/~timxb/

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Re:IETF attendees reengineer their hotel's Wi-Fi network by porges on Thursday March 29, 2012 @05:25PM (#3773197)

They later changed all the APs back to full power, "to penetrate walls".

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