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Securing your Sonos Wi-Fi network from your customers.

Many small businesses like restaurants, hotels and bars rely on a Sonos Systems for multi room audio they also want to offer free Wi-Fi to their customers.

However a problem arises when you connect your sonos system to your public Wi-Fi network. Anyone that has the sonos app can take control of the music because there is no facility for passwords in the sonos controller.

Now this can be fixed by having a separate Wi-Fi network for staff and customers but a few more steps must be taken.

You could put the staff network on a separate VLAN but this requires a VLAN enabled router and some tricky configurations that most small businesses are not going to be able to accomplish.

You could put the customers on a guest network this will isolate them from the staff network and the sonos system. You will need a guest network option built into your Wi-Fi access point or controller. This can break some application and sometimes requires a captive portal or splash page that doesn’t play well with mobile devices.

Or the best option for most is to enable L2 Isolation on the customer Wi-Fi network and then connect the sonos to the staff network. This stops Wi-Fi to Wi-Fi client traffic so the guests will not be able to access the sonos controller. As a added bonus they will not be able to see any other Wi-Fi connected devices like printers or shared folders on PC’s. Now this trick will only work if the sonos devices are connected to Wi-Fi if they are hardwired to ethernet and using sonosnet you will need to use one of the other methods above.

Wi-Fi connected Sonos devices need a strong Wi-Fi signal to work well so first you want to make sure you have enough Wi-Fi Access Points and they are located as close as possible to your sonos units.

Click here to see some of our Wi-Fi Access Points that support L2 isolation.

Here is the best Sonos device for businesses the connect you can connect it to your own amp and speakers use multiple connects for different areas.

The Sonos one is great for smaller areas like a coffee house you can pair 2 in stereo mode no amps or extra speakers required.

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Ekahau Sidekick All In One Wi-Fi Site Survey Device

Here is a video review I did on the Ekahau Sidekick it works with ekahau pro software or ekahau connect for iPad. It has 2 built in Wi-Fi survey adapters a state of the art dual band spectrum analyzer and a all day rechargeable battery . You can purchase from our store here https://www.keenansystems.com/store/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=508

Or contact me for more information keenanj@keenansystems.com

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What good is a 4×4 MIMO Access Point when all my Wi-Fi clients are 2×2 MIMO?

You may have noticed that Wi-Fi 6 802.11ax and Wi-Fi 5 802.11ac Access Points come with multiple radio chains to support MIMO either 2×2 3×3 4×4 or even 8×8. Simply put MIMO adds more capacity without using more spectrum. Each radio chain will increase speed but the client and AP must match to take advantage of this.

However most clients like smartphones, tablets and laptops only support 2×2 MIMO to save power. So what is the advantage of those extra antenna / radio chains?

If there is a mismatch in MIMO levels between the client and AP the antennas do not go unused, but are used for ‘diversity’ and ‘beamforming’, which extends range, and improves speed at range.

So a AP with more radio chains is better for all types of clients and usually has more memory and CPU allowing the AP to manage more connections faster.

Check out the EWS377AP it supports Wi-Fi 6 and has 4×4 radio chains https://www.keenansystems.com/store/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=564

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Do you need multi-gigabit switches to deploy Wi-Fi 6 access points?

Today, most business and enterprise-class switches have one-gigabit access ports and there are not many multi gigabit switches yet on the market. The ruckus ICX7150-C10ZP-2X10GR is a compact switch that can support 1/2.5/5 and 10Gb and also the new PoH power standard with up to 90W per port.

A 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) AP has the potential of more than one-gigabit throughput. Therefore, a 1 GbE access port could now possibly be the bottleneck to performance for Wi-Fi users. So many of the Wi-Fi 6 AP’s released will support up 2.5 Gbit/s using the multi gigabit ethernet standard NBASE-T / 2.5GBASE-T. Basically you can use the same Cat 5e or Cat6 ethernet cabling at higher speeds up to 100 meters.

All Wi-Fi 6 AP’s will fall back to standard 1Gbit/s and usually feature a second 1Gb only port. There are not many Wi-Fi 6 clients out in the world at this point so saturating a 1Gb port would be very difficult with legacy clients. There is no issue with deploying Wi-Fi 6 AP’s using your current gigabit switches and then plan to upgrade to multi-gigabit at a later time.

One other thing to plan for is PoE most Wi-Fi 6 AP’s require full power 802.3at or PoE+ like the engenius EWS377AP and ruckus R750 . There are a few like the engenius EWS357AP that only need half power 802.3af PoE. And some like the ruckus R730 ultra high density AP need PoH for full 8×8 stream function but will fall back to 4×4 streams with PoE+ power.

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Ruckus Wireless releases the R750 a mainstream Wi-Fi 6 Access Point for ultra dense client situations.

Ruckus has just release their second Wi-Fi 6 Access Point the R750.

It is a 4×4 11ax AP with built in radios for BLE and Zigbee. The R750 has dual ethernet ports one supports 1 / 2.5GbE and the secondary secondary 1GbE. The R750 only requires 802.3at PoE+ for full 4 stream operation so you can leverage your current switches.

Click here for more information on the R750

https://www.keenansystems.com/store/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=570

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EWS377AP a 4×4 high performance Wi-Fi 6 AP from EnGenius

With the release of the EWS377AP EnGenius now has a high performance Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) AP for business networks. The EWS377AP has 4 streams supports 1 and 2.5GbE and only requires a 802.3at PoE+ injector or switch for power. You can configure them stand alone or in a managed network with a EWS switch or ezmaster.

More information here

https://www.keenansystems.com/store/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=564

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Why migrate to Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax)? Because it is going to be more Efficient.

2019 is the year when Wi-Fi 6 clients are being released we already have some Wi-Fi 6 enabled smartphones in the market and Intels Wireless-AX 22260  Cyclone Peak Wi-Fi chipset is ready for new laptops.

If you are considering a network refresh in the next couple of years, now is the time to begin using 802.11ax / Wi-Fi 6. Wi-Fi 6 becomes more efficient with  OFDMA and Target Wake Time allowing your network to support more 802.11ax clients withe the same number of Access Points.

The efficiency gains in 802.11ax primarily come from using OFDMA in ‘dense’ environments — breaking up a channel into smaller Resource Units (RU) — where each RU is (potentially) for a different user. There are up to 9 users per 20 Mhz channel (so up to 36 users per 80 Mhz channel).

Click here for our in stock Wi-Fi 6 Access Points

https://www.keenansystems.com/store/catalog/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=Wi-Fi+6

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OFDMA how it makes Wi-Fi 6 Faster and Better

OFDMA is all about using the Wi-Fi 6 Access Points radio in the most efficient way when supporting multiple clients. MU-OFDMA  is the key technology for (802.11ax) / Wi-Fi 6. MU-OFDMA allows the Access Point to talk to multiple client devices at the same time on both the upload and the download!

Click here to see our in stock Wi-Fi 6 Access Points https://www.keenansystems.com/store/catalog/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=Wi-Fi+6