A few weeks ago my school district closed their public wifi doors and now just have their secure wifi for teachers and administrations only. The reason was that the access points could not handle all the users and their traffic. When they did this the speed on their secure wifi has greatly increased... substantially. Since then, the secure wifi key spread like wildfire throughout the student body. Now what they had before has happened again, just under one ssid instead of two.
Me (a student(also a network technician)) and the Technology Specialist at my school propose the idea of putting in double the access points that runs parallel and is separate from the secure. The secure network would sit on one network of access points and the public would sit on the other network of access points. We think this is a good economical way to go about the problem.
What do you think? What other ways could we go about this?
tl;dr What are economical ways to combat high amounts of users on access points that cannot handle it? (Upgrading current equipment is unlikely to happen because of price)
Keyword to keep in mind: Low-cost, otherwise this wont work.
closed their public wifi doors
- this is a sound idea. Back when I was younger, our school was a very early adopter of 802.11b. I just forked out $80 for a PCMCIA 802.11b WiFi card (Hey, the < 10Mbps WiFi speed was better than the 56k I had at home), waited for the WEP key to be decoded from "Interesting Packets" and voila, free internet. My mate lived within the schools 802.11 broadcast area, so I would just go to his place to borrow the schools internet. So, unless you want something like this going on, you'll want a captive portal on the public networks, or even better 802.1x