How much overhead does encryption add to the wireless traffic, and what sort of speed reduction would be considered "normal" for a network using WPA w/TKIP versus an Open (captive portal) network?
I seem to remember that our engineer also told us that using TKIP would also reduce our speeds (something about checking the "legacy" box) and that moving to WPA2 w/AES would give us better performance.
The problem I'm having is that our secure network users are starting to complain about the speed of the network versus the open network. In some cases we are seeing a reduction of close to 50% (18Mbps on open vs. 9-10Mbps on WPA). I've had a rare instance of a report of 5Mbps on WPA and 14Mbps on open. Upload speeds don't seem to vary, only the download speeds.
We've been using this design for almost 2 years, so I'm not sure why people are just now starting to complain, but the complaints have gotten bad enough that they are making their way to management.
Revamping the network to move to WPA2 w/AES is on my list of things to do........would I see any speed improvements?
Branch offices: 620 controller with AP93 (2.4ghz).
I'm open to any suggestions....not sure what to tell management at this point.