Technology Questions (those emails of "what's true...what needs tweaking")

[Mike Lowe]

Ok, I love where I work and am pretty good with technology. I'm not writing this to try and bash, I'm merely sharing in an attempt to help myself and the folks I work with better understand. Most of these posts will be things that don't sound right to me--I don't think it's a case of someone trying to pass off an issue...instead I'm trying to understand it better myself because I am in a position to help those who send these messages, as I work with them on a committee.

I figured FOFC was a good place to anonymously seek assistance.

So here's the first one. Legit, or not legit?

"We are finding that use of student computers, laptops AND desktops, is adversely affected by active cell phones and smart phones. Before your class logs in, please have them power down their phones.

Too many devices competing for too few IP connections."

[CraigSca]

Umm...I can see a bandwidth issue if all the devices are logged in and active at the same time. Only other thing I can think of is perhaps the router has only so many DHCP addresses to hand out, but that would prevent others from logging in at all.

"Adversely effect" is a broad statement. What exactly does that mean? Does it mean less performance, inability to get a connection, etc.?

[Mike Lowe]

Well, the student cell phones (allegegdly) cannot connect to the school's wifi. There are rumors, of course, that's not the case. However, I doubt most students are using the wifi as it's very limited.

As far as the performance, usually students can always log-in, but sometimes the Internet just stops working for them (websites won't load), but continues to work for others.

[johnnyshaka]

Wireless access points are likely being overwhelmed...they can only accommodate so many clients before the service deteriorates and eventually drops connections.

I'm not sure what kind of setup you guys have but enterprise gear will try to hand off the overflow to less busy access points to prevent connection drops.

[johnnyshaka]

Or your internet pipe is being choked...for example, too much network intensive surfing for your internet connection to handle.

[Chief Rum]

Or maybe it's a conspiracy to get students to shut their phones off during class...

[jeff061]

I tend to believe it's an IP address allocation issue, some admin is probably going in and cleaning out leases every hour.

[finketr]

You need to have higher density in access points.

[finketr]

alternatively, they should reduce the lease times drastically.

or increase the dhcp scopes.

[jeff061]

Ha yeah, there's plenty of fixes other than "stop using our network so much". Give me their number, I'll send them a SOW :P.

[Buccaneer]

At my place, we have a strict policy on using our company's wifi connection for personal use. Because it is so easy to use your personal device to connect to the company wifi for personal reasons (except those registered for BYOD), we have a security guy that hourly goes through and shuts of access.

[Chief Rum]

At my place, we have a strict policy on using our company's wifi connection for personal use. Because it is so easy to use your personal device to connect to the company wifi for personal reasons (except those registered for BYOD), we have a security guy that hourly goes through and shuts of access.

I'll bet he's very popular.

[Desnudo]

At my place, we have a strict policy on using our company's wifi connection for personal use. Because it is so easy to use your personal device to connect to the company wifi for personal reasons (except those registered for BYOD), we have a security guy that hourly goes through and shuts of access.

Locked down tight!

[johnnyshaka]

At my place, we have a strict policy on using our company's wifi connection for personal use. Because it is so easy to use your personal device to connect to the company wifi for personal reasons (except those registered for BYOD), we have a security guy that hourly goes through and shuts of access.

"Strict policy" and they still need to pay a guy to scour logs hourly? Hmmmm...that doesn't make much sense.

[Buccaneer]

I think he gets auto notifications when someone is in violation. But there should never be a good reason for anyone using our company's wifi for personal since 1) we are a relatively high risk company and 2) wifi has limited capacity and its slow enough as it is compared to our extensive LAN.