With so many different types of wireless devices out there today, you’re probably experiencing radio frequency (RF) interference in your wireless network whether you know it or not. RF interference is ubiquitous and there is no way to completely avoid it; the best you can do is identify sources of interference and take them into account when designing your network.  Meraki has introduced a new tool in Dashboard to determine whether interference is affecting your network adversely and to help you optimize your network for the local RF environment.

In the Meraki Dashboard, go to the access points list under the Monitor tab, and click on any active access point.  The channel utilization graph shows the percentage of time the access point has seen RF interference on its channel.  For example, if the access point is operating on channel 1 in the 2.4 GHz band, then the graph will show the amount of time channel 1 has seen interfering RF energy.

The percentage of utilization on the channel proportionally affects the peak performance that access points will be able to achieve.  Percentages higher than 30% can cause considerable connectivity issues. Here are some suggestions for reducing or coping with high levels of interference:

1.  Perform an RF site survey before deploying your network.  You can use the Real-Time Spectrum Analysis tool found on the Client Survey Tool tab of my.meraki.com with a battery-powered access point or a 3rd party spectrum analyzer to get an overview of the RF environment in your chosen place of deployment before installing your APs.
2.  Remove interfering devices from the area.  Common culprits are 2.4 GHz cordless phones, Bluetooth gadgets, microwaves and wireless video cameras.  A 3rd party packet sniffing tool can be very helpful to identify and locate interference sources.
3.  Ensure adequate wireless coverage to avoid weak spots; a weak signal from your access points is more easily degraded by local RF interference compared to a strong signal.
4.  Avoid using the same channel as neighboring wireless networks.
5.  Turn on channel spreading in Dashboard (go to the Configure tab and click on Network-wide settings) so access points can individually pick their own channel based on the RF interference they detect.
6.  If you are using Meraki 802.11n hardware, consider using the 5 GHz band to avoid the often congested 2.4 GHz band.

Using this new tool and following these simple tips will help you minimize RF interference effects in your Meraki network and optimize performance.

-Posted by Ahmed Akhtar

Last week Meraki participated in the 2009 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado.  EDUCAUSE is a non-profit organization whose mission is to advance the intelligent use of technology in higher education.  This was the first time that Meraki has participated in an EDUCAUSE event, but it will certainly not be the last!  We have never seen such a concentration of tech-savvy, higher ed IT thought leaders (more than 4000 of them) in one place before, and it was exciting to be a part of it.  Each day was packed with seminars where schools could share best practices and their experiences with various IT initiatives with their colleagues, as well as keynote talks on the latest trends and issues in higher ed IT and technology plus workshops from over 250 vendors doing demos of some very cool products on the trade show floor.

Meraki hosted a booth on the floor as well as a special dinner event for CIOs and Directors of Technology for a small group of colleges and universities.  We had the opportunity to chat with folks from schools with as little as 100 students all the way up to big state schools with over 25,000 students, and to learn about their needs and pain points.  We saw tremendous interest at the booth in Dashboard demos of some of the networks of our current higher ed customers, such as Westmont College in Santa Barbara and Sweetbriar College in Virginia.  Both schools have recently done campus-wide 802.11n deployments with Meraki, and their respective techology gurus spoke at our EDUCAUSE event about their experiences.

Major takeaways from the event:

-With the degree of budget-cutting that higher ed has seen over the last 12 months, schools are more than ever looking for ways to increase their bang-for-buck on IT spending and for ways to make reduced staff more efficient and more productive.
- There is a tremendous amount of excitement surrounding new ways to leverage cloud computing to reduce capex and operating costs of IT departments while increasing reliability and manageability of systems.
- Meraki is a great fit for higher ed, organizations that even in the best of times make due with limited budgets and IT staff that need a fully-featured wireless LAN that won’t break the bank, can be managed by a small staff and can easily scale and be rolled out across entire campuses.

We are excited to help our new friends from EDUCAUSE find ways to save money while simultaneously improving the quality of services that they can provide their students, turning their wireless networks from a liability into a strategic asset for recruiting and student retention.

Look for Meraki at future EDUCAUSE events, especially in places where the weather is as gorgeous as it was in Denver last week!

Mort and Hans giving Dashboard demos and chatting with booth visitors

-Posted by Greg Williams

Deploying the industry’s first cloud-based enterprise wireless LAN provides our customers with many unique and powerful benefits that can make IT administrators’ jobs easier.  One particularly powerful and useful tool is the ability for Meraki support staff to help remotely troubleshoot and resolve any technical issues that arise when deploying and integrating Meraki wireless networks with existing wired networks.  Leveraging the secure tunnel that is created between end devices and the Meraki Cloud Controller, Meraki can upon request assist you with basic diagnostics like checking if your firewall needs some tweaking for proper communication with your Meraki Cloud Controller.   In addition to the basics, Meraki can also conduct an in depth traffic analysis to determine what type of communication is flowing through your wired uplink as well as your wireless client connections.  This monitoring is captured in .pcap form for simple integration with popular network analysis tools such as Wireshark.  Since all of this testing can be conducted at the Meraki HQ, it allows Meraki’s Support Organization and its partners to act as natural extensions of your own networking team.  So if you’re struggling with a wireless issue and are still perplexed after searching the knowledge base, reach out to Meraki Support via Dashboard, our website or phone and save valuable time by leveraging these additional tools at your disposal.

-Posted by Dan Pittelkow

We want Meraki Dashboard to be the most functional, intuitive, and beautiful network administration system available. As of today, you can check out Dashboard’s next evolutionary step: a new layout, and new functionality, that organizes Dashboard’s appearance, makes some common tasks easier, and adds power to common pages.

The new features include:

• More of your screen real estate is used for content—for instance, maps are bigger.
• Go between pages with one click by hovering over the left-hand “tabs.” (They aren’t really tabs any more; we’ve been calling them “pills,” but you can probably come up with something better!)

• Use checkboxes on the access points page to act on many access points at once.
• Shift-click markers on the maps page to select multiple access points, then drag them as a group. Adding access points to Enterprise Edition custom maps is also easier.

We’ll be adding even more in the coming weeks. The new interface is beta for now—click the “Test drive” link in the upper right to try it out. And as always, let us know what you think!

- Posted by Eddie Kohler

Have you ever been out there troubleshooting a wireless issue and wishing you had more diagnostic tools at your disposal?  Check out http://my.meraki.com when you’re wirelessly associated to a Meraki network.  This web site provides useful information about your wireless environment and the specific Meraki access point (gateway or repeater) to which you are connected.

Check out the screen shot below to see all of the cool tools available on the different tabs of my.meraki.com.

The Access Point Status tab reveals basic information about the access point:

-    MAC address
-    Name
-    The network it’s a member of
-    Connectivity to Internet
-    Connectivity to the cloud controller
-    Firmware

The Client Survey Tool tab shows real-time spectrum analysis and client signal strength. The spectrum data comes in handy when you’re researching potential interference from other RF sources, e.g. non-Meraki access points, 2.4 and 5 GHz cordless phones, leaky microwaves, etc. Use the signal strength data to calculate the RF propagation and coverage area of the access point. Perform a quick and easy site survey with these tools by powering the access point with a battery pack:

1.  Wirelessly connect to the Meraki network from a laptop.
2.  Browse to http://my.meraki.com.
3.  Walk around with the battery-powered access point, closely watching the spectrum analysis and signal strength readings in the web browser.

You can even run a quick speed test from the access point to the laptop. In this test, the access point creates and sends data packets to the laptop from itself; these data packets are not coming from the wired network. For example, if you’re experiencing speed problems, but you get blazing speed during this wireless test, then you know the RF side is not contributing to the problem, allowing you to focus on the wired network instead.

The Mesh Neighbors tab displays a table containing data about each of the nearby Meraki access points:

-     Name
-     MAC address
-     Signal Strength
-     Percentage of packets successfully forwarded (transmitted)
-     Percentage of packets successfully received
-     Distance from the neighbor to the access point to which are you connected

If you happen to be looking at a gateway, you can also see the repeaters in its mesh route(s).  This information is very helpful when optimizing network design to maximize coverage and link signal strength.

Finally, the Static IP Configuration tab let’s you configure the IP address settings for the access point.

These tools are very useful when you’re deploying and/or troubleshooting Meraki wireless networks. They can be used to resolve a number of problems, including connectivity, speed, interference, signal quality, and coverage.

What other tools do you think we should include on this page? Let us know!

-Posted by Ahmed Akhtar

Since releasing enhanced voice and video capabilities earlier this year, we have seen growth in the number of video and voice applications running over Meraki wireless networks.  Physical security and voice/data convergence have been implemented broadly over wired networks in the last decade, but providing these applications over wireless networks is a more recent trend.  Our customers have been able to deploy these applications easily and reliably by utilizing a number of features in the Meraki solution:
1.       WMM and Power Save capabilities enable wireless devices to obtain quality of service (QoS) and conserve battery power, respectively, when associated to a Meraki wireless network.  With these features, wireless surveillance cameras and VOIP handsets can stream audio and video content with the best performance available, and at the same time, spend less time docked in battery chargers.
2.       Offline mode allows multimedia devices to continue operating in the LAN, even if connectivity to the Meraki Cloud Controller is not available.  Surveillance cameras can still stream to monitoring stations on the LAN, and mobile handsets can continue to place or receive calls, regardless of network changes outside the LAN.
3.       Bridge mode provides seamless connectivity between wireless and wired devices.  With this feature, surveillance cameras, DVRs, VOIP phones, monitoring stations, and any other networked devices that send or receive multimedia data can discover and connect to each other without any network barriers.
4.       VLAN tagging helps ensure that wireless multimedia traffic gets QoS prioritization over the wired network.  Wireless surveillance cameras and VOIP handsets can associate to Meraki over a dedicated SSID, whose traffic can be VLAN-tagged to get VIP treatment by the upstream switches and routers.
5.       Meraki’s mesh networking technology just works, without any additional configuration.  Meraki access points communicate with neighboring Meraki access points to provide wireless coverage in areas where Ethernet ports are not available.  In this way, an administrator can deploy a video monitoring environment or a wireless VOIP network quickly and easily.

All of these features work in concert to provide a superior multimedia experience over the Meraki wireless network.  As an illustration of this capability, below is a screenshot that one customer sent us, depicting 15 wireless surveillance cameras streaming video across a Meraki network to a DVR on the LAN.

We are excited about this convergence in voice, video, and data over the wireless LAN, and we will continue to invest in features that make this convergence easier and more reliable for enterprise customers.

-Posted by Jed Lau

WPA-Enterprise encryption with 802.1X authentication is the method of choice for providing secure access in an Enterprise WLAN environment.  Unfortunately it’s also notoriously tricky to configure, with a range of possible configuration issues involving the three key players in the system (client devices, access points, and the RADIUS authentication server itself).

We’re pleased to announce a handy diagnostic tool in our Enterprise Cloud Controller which helps identify many problems with a custom 802.1X setup.

After configuring your RADIUS server for 802.1X, you now have the option of testing your setup directly from Meraki Dashboard:

Enter the username and password for a test user and click the Test button. The system initiates a test from each of your Access Points to your RADIUS server using 802.1X authentication with PEAP and MS-CHAPv2. Each AP in the network is individually tested; this enables us to detect network issues or RADIUS server configuration problems that might affect only a few of your APs.

If all goes well, you’ll see results like this:

If there are test failures, however, you’ll see results like these:

In this example there was a timeout while attempting to reach the server from one out of five APs tested. This error often results from forgetting to add an AP’s IP address to the whitelist on your RADIUS server, and it’s usually a very difficult error to discover and debug.

We think this is a useful tool that makes it super easy to troubleshoot the security of your WLAN.  In addition, this tool provides peace of mind that each AP can authenticate users correctly.  Automated testing is especially valuable in large, 100+ AP environments, where testing each AP manually could literally take days.

We look forward to hearing your feedback about it!

-Posted by Ben Chambers

Meraki network admins can now block or whitelist many client devices in one easy step.  Go to the usage page, select some checkboxes, and select Actions > Whitelist (or Block, or Normal).

Want to block all Apple devices?  Try searching for “mfr:apple”, then Select: All and Block.  Or shift-click to select many checkboxes at once.  Many of our customers have requested better tools for managing many client devices; we think this is another great step in that direction.

Enterprise customers get an additional feature: the usage graph shows you how much the checked clients have transferred over time.

Want more features?  Make a wish!

Sometimes we come across a Meraki customer with a really cool story to tell, where they have found a particularly unique deployment need to fill with a Meraki network that does a great job of showcasing the capabilities and value proposition of the Meraki solution.

One of these customers is Allen Cook, owner of TourTechSupport, Inc., a unique business that provides portable IT systems to touring musicians.  When Dave Matthews, Beyonce, the Eagles, and the Kings of Leon need wireless internet for their tours, they call TourTechSupport, and then Allen Cook sends Meraki.

The life of a touring rock musician is complicated, hectic, and occasionally downright chaotic.  When the talent hits the stage, everything has to be working seamlessly to provide the paying fans with adrenaline-stoking lifetime memories.  The behind-the-scenes operations of tours are complex. Crew, staff, and band members need phone and internet access and have had to rent phone lines, voicemail, extension dialing, call-waiting and Internet access from the venues they played.  In every new city, there were new phone numbers to remember, new network connections to configure, and little control in restricting network access.  The costs – and the headaches – added up quickly.

Cook saw a need, and set out to fill it. His company, TourTechSupport, created an IT rack system that touring professionals can take with them on the road— including wireless routers, access points, printers and other business communication essentials. He knew that the system had to be easy to launch at each new venue, so that any crew member on the tour can set it up. “With Meraki, I can support my clients anywhere in the world, because I can monitor networks remotely…In the rare case of equipment failure, replacement components can be on-site quickly and untrained staff can make the swap,” Cook says.  Beyond data communication, he also wanted to include VoIP, so that tours could use telephone numbers that would remain the same regardless of their geographic location, as well as provide place shifting technology to meet demand for leisure time entertainment.

Cook examined multiple wireless solutions, but found most to be hard to deploy, inconsistent and often very expensive.  He considered Linksys solutions, available through Cisco, and options from EnGenious and Ubiquity, but found them less flexible, more expensive and often complicated.

Then Cook called upon Meraki. By including 5 or 10 Meraki Outdoors with the IT rack, all a crew member had to do was establish an internet connection, strategically place the Meraki access points, power-up and voila: high-quality, access controlled WiFi in just minutes.  Portability and aesthetics are also important.  Meraki repeaters are, “smaller and slicker than anything else on the market,” he says.

The systems from TourTechSupport are used for everything from coordinating where the crew members stay each night, to providing VoIP phone service, to entertaining the entertainers. Controlling access into and across the networks is crucial. “We frown on open networks. If a tour manager’s computer is on an open network, anyone with a basic knowledge has access to the tour budget, housing schedule and other confidential information,” Cook said. Meraki’s security features keep the network strictly private.

TourTech’s partnership with The Dave Matthews Band is a great example of how Meraki makes touring a better experience. The Dave Matthews Band has 50 crew members on a nearly endless touring schedule. They tour with 13 trucks and 9 buses. Matthews is an outspoken activist on green issues, as well. His tour’s system includes a Meraki Solar that extends the WiFi signal beyond the walls of the main structure.  “Many venues do not have accommodations that allow the entire crew ample work and rest space,” Cook explains. “This used to mean that Ethernet and power cables needed to be run between the main facility and auxiliary accommodations. Now, they simply place a Meraki Outdoor at the main facility and a Meraki Solar by each outlying facility—Internet and communication across the entire compound.”

The Beyonce tour operates without a dedicated IT technician on the road. “We used their tour as our ultimate test for the ease-of-use of a system,” Cook said. “If we don’t get any calls for support, we know we have built an IT rack that meets our user-friendly requirements.” The only support call he’s received so far from the Beyonce tour ended up being an issue with a crew member’s laptop; the IT rack and the mesh were working perfectly.

Saving his clients money and improving their efficiency is not just Cook’s livelihood, but his passion. Thanks to Allen for letting us share his story!  Stay tuned for more posts in the future as we find other cool and unusual things that our customers are doing with Meraki networks…

-Posted by Greg Williams

Last Thursday, Meraki participated in a great event: the Ingram Micro Partner Connections Summit in Denver, Colorado.

The most remarkable observation that could be made was the clear presence of a sense of optimism throughout the conference after a year of apprehension.   We spoke to a good portion of the 225 resellers at the event, and the majority were very excited about the remainder of 2009 and 2010 based on the uptick in the level of interest that they are seeing from their customers across their product lines.  They see wireless networking as a potential growth opportunity for them for 2010, and more specifically, Meraki’s cloud-managed Wireless LANs as a great opportunity to acquire new customers or offer an innovative new solution to existing customers.

A little bit more about the event… Ingram Micro, the event organizer and sponsor (and a distributor of Meraki), is a Fortune 100 company and the world’s largest technology distributor.  They distribute and market IT products from everyone from Apple to Cisco.

The Partner Connections Summit brings together hundreds of fast-growth channel partners and IT manufacturers to discuss emerging IT trends, train on new technologies and explore a variety of partner enablement tools available exclusively to Ingram Micro channel partners.  We truly enjoyed meeting so many IT Solution Providers focused on small and medium sized businesses, and we look forward to other Ingram Micro and similar channel events in the near future!

Check out some of the pictures from the show to see us in action…

John ready for action!

Andy takes a breather...

Andy gives a product demo to a reseller

-Posted by John Sampson

The Meraki MR58 is one of the industry’s first 802.11n outdoor access points and also one of the only economical multi-radio solutions.   It is a unique product, and we get a lot of questions from customers about how best to deploy it to take full advantage of its capabilities.  With 3 high speed 802.11n MIMO radios on 3 different frequencies the MR58 has unparalleled flexibility to replace old “single use” hardware platforms.

As the “Veg-O-matic” of access points (It slices, it dices, it minces, it juliennes, it makes French Fries!), the MR58 is a powerful tool for solving all kinds of network deployment challenges.

3 things to remember about the MR58

1. There are three radios in the MR58. One (R3) always operates in a 2.4Ghz channel. The other two (R1 and R2) always operate in different 5Ghz channels.
2. Channels are selected automatically. If the MR58 is a deployed as a repeater (is not connected directly to the Internet), it will find a strong uplink on any radio and hold that channel. The other radios will pick channels depending on the default settings in dashboard.
3. Each radio requires 2 antennas, or a dual-feed MIMO antenna. Both antennas should cover the same area and have the same strength/type. The best coverage and connection signal strength will come from having the same coverage area and orthogonal polarizations.

The MR58 with Various Antennas

3 types of deployments that the MR58 is great for:

1.    High Client-Density Networks
When deployed as a gateway (with its own dedicated internet connection) the MR58 can move client traffic on all of its radios. With band steering enabled on Dashboard, client devices capable of 5 GHz operation will jump to those radios automatically. With all three radios aimed at the same coverage area, hundreds of users can connect simultaneously.  Even in a network with some MR58 repeaters, the additional bandwidth available in 5 GHz because of the third radio means that mesh connections will not distract in any way from providing full bandwidth to the user community.  For example, at a GigaOm conference earlier this year we had over 100 simultaneous user on a single device with zero hiccups.

2.    Large Area Networks
For good client coverage over spread out areas like a school/corporate campus or a city district, each of the radios can be put to specific use. One of the 5 GHz radios can be paired with directional antennas that specifically point toward the system gateway. The other 5 GHz radio should use the standard omni-directional antennas to provide a balance between good 5 GHz client coverage and strong meshing. The more MR58’s that can see each other on the “extra” 5 GHz radio, the better failover and localized interference rejection will work. Finally, the 2.4 GHz radio should be pointed at the area where clients are expected to be. This can be done with omni antennas, omni antennas designed with down-tilt for ground level coverage, or a weak sector antenna with aimed wide angle coverage.

3.    Long Distance Point to Point Bridges
A set of MR58s can be used to create a long distance “bridge” or a repeating series of long distance links. Using two high gain directional antennas, links of up to 20 Kilometers can be created. For links longer than 20 km or that require higher speeds (shorter, stronger paths), 2 sets of directional antennas can be used to create a full speed mesh relay.  The remaining radio can be used for client coverage, local mesh links, or an additional long distance link. Either the 2.4 GHz radio or the 5 GHz radios can be used for the creation of a long distance link. 2.4 GHz will work better at extreme distances (15-20Km); 5 GHz links have an advantage in environments that have a lot of 2.4Ghz noise, like cities or areas with overlapping networks of coverage.  For information on link distances, see our range calculator tool.

We hope that this MR58 “primer” is helpful in figuring out how to get the most out of your Meraki network!

-Posted by Morgan Teachworth

On Thursday, September 17, Meraki hosted a very successful Enterprise Customer Summit (ECS) at our headquarters in San Francisco.  The goal of ECS is to get direct, unfiltered feedback on our products from some of our key customers.  While these customers tend to be our biggest advocates, they are also our harshest critics!  We began by having the customers deliver short presentations about their Meraki deployments, which served not only to break the ice, but also to start the flow of feedback for Meraki—what’s going well, what could be improved, and what new features are interesting to our customers.  Next, we dove into a product session, during which we sanity-checked our immediate short-term roadmap and brainstormed our long-term roadmap.  Finally, during the marketing session, we explored messaging, lead generation, and go-to-market strategies that could help Meraki find the customers with the pain points (i.e. high cost and complexity of deploying or upgrading a wireless LAN solution) that Meraki solves very effectively.

Besides obtaining the feedback that we solicited, we left these discussions with 2 key takeaways:

·         We confirmed that wireless networking is no longer an amenity for companies and organizations; it is a mission-critical requirement for a variety of deployment areas (offices, campuses, warehouses, etc.) and a variety of users (employees, students, visitors, etc.).  Administrators need to provide reliable wireless connectivity as easily and affordably as possible.
·         By moving network infrastructure into the cloud, customers are able to spend less time maintaining and monitoring the network infrastructure, and more time helping the clients who use the network infrastructure.  This shift in focus has yielded tangible benefits in how IT departments allocate their time (and money).

At the end of an action-packed day, we received very positive comments from the ECS participants.  Here’s what one person said: “I love the chance to be included in these sorts of meetings. I was so encouraged to move from a great sales experience into a rich technology experience….We are excited to be a part of [Meraki's future].”

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year’s ECS.  And thanks to all of our customers who have provided us with feedback over the years, either by “making a wish” or by contacting Meraki Technical Support.  Please keep the feedback coming!

-Posted by Jed Lau

Administrators can now identify which operating system their wireless clients are running without requiring any client software. This information can be useful when trying to debug a network or get a sense of what kind of clients are using a network.

Meraki APs identify clients using a technique called OS fingerprinting. Each OS, and sometimes version of an OS, has a unique DHCP fingerprint. By examining a client’s DHCP request, we can tell which OS it is running.

Meraki admins can see client information in a number of pages, including the client detail page.

- Posted by Hans Robertson

One of the main advantages of using multi-band access points like the MR14 or MR58 is that they can increase the total bandwidth available for clients on the network (e.g., 20MHz on 2.4 GHz and 40 MHz on 5 GHz). However, some devices that are 5 GHz capable (i.e. 802.11a/n clients) will connect with a 2.4 GHz radio even when a 5 GHz radio is available. Usually this is not desirable because there is less congestion on the 5 GHz band.

Meraki access points can now be configured to steer 5 GHz-capable wireless clients towards the 5 GHz band. These devices will connect at faster speeds and more clients will be able to connect to the network simultaneously.

Administrators can turn Band Steering on or off per SSID.

- Posted by Hans Robertson

Many Meraki users rely on the Cloud Controller for various aspects of the user authentication process. For example, some networks use 802.1x (WPA-Enterprise) to authenticate against a hosted user database. Others rely on Meraki to host a splash page that must be viewed before login.

There may be times when a network cannot communicate with the Cloud Controller. This can happen in a few ways, for example, when the network’s Internet connection fails or if the Cloud Controller is temporarily unreachable.

Meraki now allows the administrator to configure what happens to new clients when the network is “disconnected.” In Open mode, new clients are allowed to access the network without signing in. In Closed mode, only clients on the white list (if any) can get on.

Disconnection behavior can be controlled per SSID.

In any case, clients that are already authenticated with the network continue to use the network without interruption.

- Posted by Hans Robertson