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5GHz Unlicensed WiFi Channels in the UK - White Paper

(Note: this white paper has been superseded with this new updated version ) I put together a few articles a few months ago talking about how the unlicensed 5GHz band is used for WiFi here in the UK. I thought it might be a good idea to consolidate all of the information that I found in to one place, so that people researching the topic could find and digest it more easily. Therefore I put together a white paper about how 5GHz is used for WiFi here in the UK. You can download it from here. There will no doubt be errors, omissions and other facts that folks would like to suggest. So, please feel free to drop me a note and I'll update this document from time to time to improve the quality of information that it contains. Nigel. Download the document from the following sources: Scribd Google Docs

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