Wireless Water Cooler

Our office is hosting its annual holiday decorating contest, and this year, Garrett and myself (OSU's Wi-Fi engineers) decided to contribute. Others have crisened their cubicles with wrapping paper, streams, candy canes, and even inflatable Santa. We, however, decided to take a different approach.

Third party testing has provided benchmarks that clearly indicate our tree provides better Wi-Fi connectivity than any other Christmas tree in the building.

With 8 AP-105s and 1 AP-225, Santa's reindeer are showering the building with 802.11 goodness.

And it's not just for show either! Thirteen (13) ESSIDs are broadcasted, each one dedicated to one of the departments within the office.

Connect to an open network and open a browser to be redirected to a holiday greeting wherein said team, dressed as elves, rhythmically prance around the window.

We have built lots of Wi-Fi services with our Aruba infrastructure over the past 8 years, but this - by far - is the most festive. :-)

Happy holidays, everyone!

(Config snippets attached to get all you geeks off.)

Attachment(s)

xmas-config.txt   1 KB 1 version

I was fully expecting some vintage "ornaments" on the tree. AP-65 and AP-70 would have CAPped it off. Love it!

Totally doable, Kelly, since we have >2,100 of them. However, the LEDs for legacy APs aren't multi-color, and we wouldn't have been able to get the red/green color theme happening.

I guess we could have filled stockings with the yellow discolored plastic APs as a coal-equivalent. :-P

That's amazing, but that's a lot of SSID's.