In celebration of spring, we’ve added some new colors to Meraki
Dashboard’s device pages. Our connectivity graphs now show much more
information about device status through time. In particular:

• Gateway devices, which are connected directly to the Internet,
  appear as darker green. A device with an intermittent Internet connection may
  change shade as it switches between repeater and gateway. For example,
  this node came online at around 19:10, but its Internet connection came up
  about an hour later:
  
• New orange and yellow colors show times when a device can reach
  Dashboard, but cannot be used by clients. This can happen, for instance,
  when your upstream DNS server appears down, or when repeaters can’t find a
  gateway in your network.
  

In summary, green shows when devices are usable by clients,
orange and yellow show when devices are unusable by clients but can
reach Meraki, and red shows when devices cannot even reach Meraki.
Different shades distinguish between gateway and repeater and other
important states. If you forget what a color means, move the mouse over a
large connectivity graph and a tooltip will tell you.

This functionality depends on our latest firmware, so you may not see
the new colors until your network automatically upgrades. We hope this
more detailed information will help you debug your network faster and
easier.

- posted by Eddie Kohler

We often get asked the question, “How far apart can our nodes be and still have a good connection?”.  While nothing is a substitute for actually trying the link out, we’ve created a Range Calculator to help plan your networks.  This tool can help predict distances between nodes, and help you decide what type of antenna to use to cover the distance that you want.

The Range Calculator is compatible with all of our products and accessories.  It is also customizable for antennas that we do not stock and has options to allow you to pick your radio transmit power so that you can keep regulatory domain compliance in mind.  For actual installation, we calculate the required antenna height above obstructions to keep a clear line of sight.  We hope you find our Range Calculator as useful as we do!

- posted by Nancy Sun

Meraki has recently released support for the Wireless Multi Media (WMM) and 802.11e Quality of Service (QoS) standards. These standards improve the performance of certain bandwidth intensive and latency sensitive applications over wireless networks.

WMM provides four different traffic classes: voice, video, best effort, and background. Devices that support WMM and request a higher level of service, such as WiFi handsets, will receive higher priority on Meraki networks, improving their performance.

Meraki also supports WMM power save mode. Many mobile devices that support WiFi are prone to excessive battery drain. WMM power save improves on the standard 802.11 power save poll mode by allowing devices to “sleep” differently when they receive critical vs. non-critical packets. Devices that support WMM power save should experience extended battery life when using a Meraki network.

For the more technically inclined, Meraki supports the EDCA and TXOP protocols. U-APSD is supported on most platforms as well.

- Posted by Xiao Yu

Many of our customers who use splash-based access control on their networks have requested the ability to prevent multiple simultaneous logins on their network. We’re pleased to announce that this feature is now available on Meraki networks using either the “specific users” or RADIUS-based splash page authentication methods.

This setting is called “Prevent Multiple Simultaneous Logins”, and it’s located on the “Advanced Settings” page in Meraki Dashboard.

When enabled, Meraki Dashboard tracks the computer (MAC address) from which a given user logs in. If a user logs in from a different computer than the previous login, Dashboard will automatically de-authorize the previous computer. This prevents a single login account from being used by multiple computers at one time.

Note that Meraki’s billing solution has always performed this type of simultaneous login prevention, so this setting in Dashboard will not affect the behavior of your billing networks in any way.

This feature is available in Meraki Pro and Carrier Editions.