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I have an issue in a hotel. Very slow speeds.

When I do a scan from the installed APs, they pick up Symbol Technologies MAC addresses (no ssid) at 100% signal strength.

The channels that the Symbol devices are on stay the same, but I can find the same device (MAC address) at 100% signal strength at an AP on the other end of the building.

The APs on either side of the AP picking up the signal at 100% don't even see the problem device.

So it seems like these are very low power transmitting devices and that they are mobile.

Is there a way to find out exactly what type of devices these are by the MAC address or can you only find out the manufacturer?

Thanks.

See if you can run "NMAP" against them.

A protocol analyser may help too.

A spectrum analyzer may be able to tell you what kind of interference you may be dealing with. As far as I know you can only verify a vendor by the MAC address, not specific models. I know many vendors run products in batches (and hence similar MAC's) so it [i]may [/i]be possible but probably unlikely. Good luck! Let us know what you find.

Chuck

00:A0:F8 is all old Symbol gear, 802.11b only, 00:15:70 newer stuff mostly Moto branded Symbol gear, 802.11 a/g, mostly true.
Just a couple of questions though; what is the RSSI of the detected devices, and do you know if the restaurant/foodservice uses MC?s for ordering, including room service. Also if the hospitality Co. is either Micros/Aramark you might have another WLAN in the hotel to contend with.

Re: RSSI, on one AP scan, there were three of the problem devices being picked up at 100%. And there is at least one at 100% being picked up by at least one of the hotel APs at any given time (at least before 10:00pm).

Today I was able to contact the owner and had him associate with a particular AP while there were none of the interfering devices being picked up on it. Speeds were great.

No foodservice devices being used by hotel. It just so happens, I'm going down to where this hotel is located over the holiday weekend (I'm 600 miles away). I'll stop by and locate the devices.

Any other tips/help appreciated.

100% is meaningless, I mean dB values. What are the MAC?s you?re seeing?
What type of WLAN are you running?

I'm 600 miles away from the hotel. Only thing I can do is put the AP in bridge mode and scan available devices. It shows the signal strength of the devices it's picking up by percentages.

No RSSI or DBm.

It's an open guest system. APs to a switch to a hotspot/gateway to the ISP modem.

interfering MACS = 00:A0:F8:x:x:x

There is another guest system with problems at another hotel 400 miles from the other. I see 12 of these 00:A0:F8 devices being picked up by one AP there as well.

Can you ask if the hotel had a previous WLAN? It sounds like a 4121/4131 WLAN is still operational; these devices could be installed where they were powered from a low voltage cable, not POE. The other thing is that you?re seeing the devices @100 signal, almost sounds like the new AP?s might have been swapped with the old one?s but not de-installed or turned off?