wifi range extenders

[E_G_R2]

Hi,

 

boarding school here, we have Ruckus WiFi and the pupils have complained in the past of dead spots in one of the boarding houses. The maintenance staff have just reported finding a couple of Netgear WiFi extenders plugged into the mains on a corridor. The MAC address of the devices shows up on my rogue Devices list and I have already marked as malicious.

 

My question is will this stop the devices from extending the WiFi for the kids? or am I going to have to do something else to disable the devices.

[FN-GM]

Using 802.1x will solve it, they simply won't work.

[AlanD]

Considering the rather extraordinary large cost of boarding, it would seem the very least you could do is provide them with decent wifi coverage. If they could live st home they'd probably have a 30mb openreach fibre connection for themselves, and providing them with something similar should be seriously looked at. I am slightly surprised that you are just using what appears to be a personal wpa code to connect....much better to use the ad/radius enterprise connection so that they are identified clearly. Assume you must have a captive portal...but they are such a pain when you just want to use an app because you have to go throug a browser first...and presumably it operates for a fixed time before reauthenticating.

 

Seems they were the enterprising ones...and you are doing to be wanting.....

[E_G_R2]

Considering the rather extraordinary large cost of boarding, it would seem the very least you could do is provide them with decent wifi coverage. If they could live st home they'd probably have a 30mb openreach fibre connection for themselves, and providing them with something similar should be seriously looked at. I am slightly surprised that you are just using what appears to be a personal wpa code to connect....much better to use the ad/radius enterprise connection so that they are identified clearly. Assume you must have a captive portal...but they are such a pain when you just want to use an app because you have to go throug a browser first...and presumably it operates for a fixed time before reauthenticating.

 

Seems they were the enterprising ones...and you are doing to be wanting.....

 

Thanks for your really helpful post i'm so proud to be fleecing parents with my awful WiFi provision - in a small area of the campus that is medieval in construction. I'll replace my 200Mb fibre connection with your Dandy 30Mb one and see it fly. You obviously have a limited knowledge of schools finance, public or private where a very large % of Monies is spent on salaries and buildings. FYI most of our pupils are on assisted places so our fee's are capped but our staffing costs remain the same as any other establishment.

 

I didn't go into details of our setup because my questions was does the rogue devices feature in Ruckus stop the boosters from functioning.

 

No our setup isn't open and devices have to authenticate to connect. The biggest problem is infrastructure to some areas and demand, most pupils run between 3 to 5 WiFi enables devices at a time, often in a room shared by 4 pupils.

 

I'm going to have to get some AP's into these areas and connect them through meshing as the cabling doesn't provide the QOS for the AP's to function properly but it may surprise you that money is also an issue in the private sector, the only 'wanting' i've been doing is getting the funds available to improve the infrastructure.

[AlanD]

First my apologies...in that I was deliberately looking to raise your hackles....

And so it might surprise you to know that I work in the Independent sector to - although a day school rather than boarding (but have worked in the later too)

And I am often keen to point out to suppliers that money can be extraordinarily tight in a private school....and indeed pride myself in being really careful with what I spend.

But it would seem reasonable that a school offering boarding should be providing reasonable internet access for their boarders - and that might be several FTTC or Virgin cable broadband lines into a load balancer for every boarding house - or a multi-gigabit leased line connection if boarding houses have connections to the rest of the school. As you point out every user often has multiple devices and often use streaming video services. Bandwidth demands moves on at a pace and expectations will continue to increase. I think most schools - and boarding schools do understand this and need be constantly raising the bar. If you fail to keep pushing for this - you will get the blame because internet is so slow as to be unusable. No one will thank you for saving a couple of thousand pounds here or there, despite their objections when you propose spending more. Getting a reputation for not meeting student demands will ultimately drive students elsewhere.