Automated 802.11 Spectrum Analysis/Remediation: Benefits And Implications
Posted by
Lee H. Badman
May 10, 2010
Add to this thousands of microwave ovens, Bluetooth keyboards, mice and headsets, as well as a bazillion low-end wireless printers in our dorms that came out of the box with radios enabled but only get used via USB cable, and you start to get the picture. Let's not leave out dozens and dozens of Wi-Fi-equipped vehicles moving around campus, from delivery trucks to buses and limos. When I think about the sheer volume of signals zipping around within my area of responsibility, the word "overwhelmed" is never far from front and center.
The diagnostic advantages of Clean Air and it's competitors are obvious, especially when the system lets you essentially reach back in time to see what may have been going on RF-wise yesterday in a given area when trouble tickets are slow to work their way through the system. But with screen after screen of potentially actionable intelligence, we'll have to draw our own lines on what we react to. If a given space seems heavy with offending devices, but no one's complaining, do we still go out and proactively clean house by lecturing those in the area that they've got the conference room Bluetooth keyboard too close to our access point, and oh, by the way, can everybody not use the microwave oven in the break room until we can get someone to fund one that's more RF-quiet?
Or do simply marvel at thousands of more data points in the form of functional eye-candy without really doing anything about what we see until someone grouses? Remember, 11n will give us "9 times this and 5 times that" and re-grow hair on your bald spot if you buy all of the vendor hype, but not if radio conditions are compromised by all of the many devices that we have in use in the normal course of business.
Thankfully, the smart wireless systems in use today are adept at managing their own power and channel to hopefully dance around the varying conditions that the new distributed-spectrum analysis tools are meant to track. But it's still radio, and that means weird things can happen. Given that Murphy's Law says that most weird things will happen either at the worst possible time or when no one is around to react, the power of products like Clean Air will make a difference in keeping the reliability where it should be in high-reliability 11n networks. But first, we'll have to do two things: establish a whopping collection of known signals that we simply can't do a thing about from a practical standpoint, and then we have to develop a mindset and policy that guides how and when we remove competing devices. Once we get there, yes, these tools will be sweet.
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