I was just wondering how everyone is managing their handheld barcode scanners, in a manufacturing environment? Where I work, a lot of the scanners are a decade old now. Management just doesn’t understand, that its time to get new equipment.
We are talking 802.11b devices here, sticky clients, bad roaming, it’s a real task to keep these things going. I will tell you one thing, they sure don’t play nice with all those high metal racks. Multipath has me tearing my hair out at times.
Flash, Ahead to today where everyone wants BYOD and High density wireless, with the latest in policy control and 802.11ac. the business types just want to throw it all together and expect it to just work.
What I try to do, if I have to support legacy 802.11b clients, is to turn off all the data rates except for 11, this seems to help somewhat. But some of the devices just don’t work right with just 11 turned on. And if your noise floor is too high, it just won't connect.
I am wondering what the future holds for handheld devices, in this case barcode scanners, has anyone implemented 5ghz in a manufacturing environment? Are there 802.11n scanners?
Will there ever be an end to sticky clients, and will we truly get some granular policy control over these devices? I sure hope #genmobile can help out with the next generation of modern barcode scanners.