Wireless Access

Still new to Aruba here. But here we go. The situation is that we have a fairly decent sized conference room. It is covered by 4 AP-225's with about 75-80 users in the room. The users are a mix of employees and guests. We broadcast a corporate and guest SSID. I get reports of users of both types being dropped and general slow network. I look at the first AP and see 11 hotspots or mifi devices showing as interferrence. I also notice that particular AP that it had to change it's power settings at the time that everyone dropped. Speed tests are about 15%-25% of what I expected. As soon as the meeting is over, and the hotspots go away, the network returns to normal. So my basic question is what effect would the personal hotspots have on the corporate wireless network? Is their a best practice to handle these? I am kind of looking for specifics (articles/white papers) that I can use to build a case against guests using these. The are customers so it has to be handled correctly. 

You can try to shame people into not bringing up hotspots, but you cannot really stop them.  There are legal limitations:  http://community.arubanetworks.com/t5/Wireless-Access/The-FCC-has-clarified-their-stance-on-wireless-containment-but/m-p/226342#M46143

The best thing to do, would be to make your wifi so much better that it is a hassle for people to use hotspots.  

Most hotspots use 2.4ghz band (some can be configured for 5ghz, but that is less prevalent), so that would only affect 2.4ghz clients in most circumstances.  In a typical high density evironment, you would typically need to have an access point for every 30 users to make things comfortable, so 4 access points might be overkill.  

- You should be operating with 20mhz channels on the 5ghz band so that you can have as many channels as possible.

- You should also enable broadcast filtering on ll your virtual APs to ensure that unneeded broadcasts do not compete with your legitimate traffic.

- You might also want to have the transmit power on the access points in that room as low as possible, so that those extra APs do not cause any interference or degradation outside of that room, or that nobody outside of that room would want to connect inside that room.

We do have a high density validated reference design guide here:  http://community.arubanetworks.com/t5/Validated-Reference-Design/High-Density-Wireless-Networks-for-Auditoriums/ta-p/155578 but the bullet points above are just concerns based on what you mentioned in your post...

Thanks for the quick reply. As far as the number of AP's, this is part of a much larger room. It's one of the conference rooms that has rolling sub-dividers so that it can be made into a number of configurations. Any suggestions for other things to look for when I'm troubleshooting these calls? Like I said, I start by looking into a local AP, and look for interference and power level changes. We recently upgraded airwave so I'm still looking into that. Any suggestions there?