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802.11ad - Just for Home Cinema...Right?

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One of the things I love about Twitter is that once in a while you stumble across something that completely shifts your view of the world. I spotted this little nugget (posted by  @wifichef ) a couple of days ago, which made me significantly re-assess my view of the application of 802.11ad technology: " A deeper dive in to High Capacity WLANs:  http://t.co/L6kcx5oMI9 " Expecting another deep dive in to 802.11n high density WLANs (...small cell sizes, using 5GHz, band steering, disabling lower speeds etc.) I clicked through the link to see if I could find any new information. However, I was completely surprised to find myself looking at a  whitepaper  discussing the merits of 802.11ad! In fact, it actually highlighted the disadvantages of a traditional 'legacy' WiFi network - this had me hooked :) I must admit that I had dismissed 802.11ad (which uses the 60GHz band) as a niche technology that I'd probably hardly ever see in the Enterprise environments that

Cisco ACS Policy Decisions Based on SSID Name

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If you're using an authentication server (such as Cisco's ACS) to make policy decisions about wireless users, there may be times when you'd like to make a decision based on the name of the SSID that the user is joining. In this article, we'll look at how you can do this. In this article, I'm going to assuming that we are using a Cisco wireless LAN controller, together with a flavour of Cisco ACS 5.x. I've seen this method used with Cisco ACS 4.x (see references at the bottom of this article) and wouldn't be surprised if you could modify the technique for other RADIUS servers. When Googling about this subject, I don't see any results that show how to do this in ACS 5.x, so thought it was worth a quick note. Background In brief, when a wireless client is attempting to authenticate to an SSID on a Cisco WLC network, if 802.1x is being used to authenticate users, then various RADIUS attributes are sent to the RADIUS server (e.g. ACS) as part of

Aruba Tech Field Day - 802.11ac Product Announcement

Yesterday was the official launch of Aruba's journey in to the world of 802.11ac with their online (and real-world) Tech Field Day event where they presented their products and strategy for  11ac . I was a virtual participant, watching from over here in the UK. I have to say up-front that I do not currently supply or support Aruba products, but was very interested to hear more about their views on 802.11ac, together with their product offering. There was a lot of ground covered, but here a few (brief) notes of things that I found of particular interest for the sessions I managed to view. 802.11ac There was a very informative and lengthy discussion around 802.11ac technology, together with the lessons learned by Aruba in their testing to date. I won't cover all points here, but the headlines that stuck in my mind were: Smartphones/tablets will continue to be primarily single stream, capable of 80MHz bonded channel support Although 11ac brings significant speed a