True Intentions?
I am a network designer, and in conference type settings, these units are sometimes needed for anything to work at all.
If you have a couple thousand - or more - wifi devices operating within one large open area, your rf engineering needs to be solid, and part of that is using every piece of available rf spectrum.
People coming in and trying to use their own wifi hotspots can realistically screw up a lot of other people.
I don't know what the real driver was behind these decisions, it may very well have been a malicious money grabbing exercise. However we don't know that.
I can tell you for a fact that these types of systems exist in many large meeting spaces as a necessary tool to facilitate stability. I can also tell you for a fact that after these systems have been installed, the "no one can have 3rd party wifi networks for stability" has been retranslated in sales as "you are not allowed to use any network but ours, that'll be 300$ please" which is not them being malicious, it's just them using the language they know.
As for the network you paid 300$ for being $h1t, (or your 20$ hotel internet being the same....) well that's just down to bad business. I can tell you in our systems we are routinely getting good response and throughput, although that normally entails multiple gigabit links (just a few weeks ago we did a network with 20 gigabit of internet....). Don't think it's just a business being cheap either, while that is often the case, I find it just as often that the IT people don't understand the needs or haven't properly enumerated and planned for the loads.
Again, I am not saying that this wasn't an issue of malicious intent, but I do hope you recognize that these scenarios are well beyond your average SME wifi network, and some of the tactics used to keep them stable and responsive may strike the uninformed as overbearing.
At very least hopefully some of you reading this will gather some new perspective.
Karl P
Biting the hand that feeds IT
