We have never had a PSK/Guest network on Campus. There is a slightly broken system that will create temporary guest accounts for our WPA2-Enterprise network for contractors, small events and meetings, but most visiting people are expected to use eduroam.
The campus fitness center has a fieldhouse that was built in the late 1970’s and was made of a never-before-used steel roof sustained by compressed air…so your ears pop every time you enter the space through the air-lock doors haha. It is 300’ x 240’ in size and the domed roof measure 35’ high.
Many large events are held here, and it is available for public rentals. In May the city job fair returned and as they do every year, they had asked for guest access to the wireless. Not just for the 150 booths this time but for the 2500 job seekers that would be attending. It seems most companies that were attending no longer take paper resumes and will provide a QR code or site to submit applications.
For the first time our director agreed that we should provide a guest SSID for an event. It would only be broadcast on the APs located in the field house, but we were going to get to do it. We were also setting a precedence haha.
Since the fieldhouse was not set very well for coverage (3 at the outer edges of a very open space to cover where people may sit and watch) I asked for a floor plan of the event layout and went over to do a site walk and take some readings. They were only using 2/3rds of the space and being so open, it did look like the coverage was ok but once I added in the dividers, crowds and accounted for the capacity, a different picture was painted.
I had created my own AP on a stick stand some time ago. It has a 7ft max height, but it was better than nothing. I was able to find an active floor plate within a few feet of where I needed and provisioned a temporary AP for the event.
The next part was to create a guest SSID, AP group and policies. This was done with a bit of caution since even though they had approved it, our director and CISO were still leery.
I set up a bench test just on the temporary AP at my desk. After proving I get do basic browsing an email with no issue, I then made sure I couldn’t get to any of our internal sites. Success! 😊
After adding the fieldhouse APs to the new AP group, I provisioned the floor plate and brought the temp AP on a stand to connect. I had to find a table to put in front of it to block it off a bit. I didn’t trust that it wouldn’t be bumped and tip over or even that the someone wouldn’t trip on the tripod legs.
I performed a passive survey of the space, and everything looked great, but I knew there would be some changes once all the people filled the space the next day.
The event ran from 10am-3pm so I stopped over around 11am. It was packed!
This gave me an opportunity to see the differences in the reading of the mostly empty space and the now crowded space. Most places were still good but as I made my way to the centre of the room where the signal strength had been between -53 and -60, I was now getting between -65 and -72. Was pretty neat to see. I did find one coverage hole in the back right corner. It turned out the field house staff had blocked one of the APs with some collapsed bleachers and a few other things. I checked with the booths in the area, and they had luckily not been using the network. Since it would have been a lot of work for the staff to move everything, we decided to leave it as is.
We did hit high capacity on a few of the APs but not for long periods of time, so everything was deemed a success. After the event I disables the guest SSID and AP groups and since this had now set a precedence for future events, I was asked by my director if anything was needed going forward. I asked to purchase 2 or 3 larger and more stable AP stands. He said to get 5 in case there were simultaneous events across the campuses.
I chose the WiFiStand stackable flat stand kits. https://wifistand.com/collections/kits/products/wifistand-portable-flat-stand-basic-kit-stackable-sections
They come with 4 – 2 foot sections in the kit for a total of 8 feet, so I also purchased some extra 2ft sections to have in case we require extra height some times. *WiFiStand.com does not recommend assembling the stand any higher than 12 feet.
They arrived a few days ago and I can’t wait for the next event to try them out! 😊
Let's Ginger-Fi it! 
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