Multiple SSIDs are great. They allow you to deploy one physical WiFi infrastructure, then create multiple virtual networks that operate almost completely independently of each other. The same network that is providing WiFi service to your guests, can also connect your corporate laptops, VoIP phones, Building Management terminals, mobile POS systems, payment terminals, and lots more.
Multiple SSIDs are also horrible. Not only are they confusing if they are not named properly, but they also cause a significant amount of background noise in the air. More information about this can be found in the Ruckus whitepaper titled “Network Scaling – Choosing the right number of SSIDs” but, in short, if you have a conference room with 6 APs and you enable 5 SSIDs, the 2.4Ghz band becomes completely unusable even before there are any clients connected!
Hotels heavily rely on Wi-Fi, it is the #1 amenity guests look for. It needs to be top-notch. It is also the go-to solution for all connected services. It is very common to have the following type of SSID setup in a hotel
If we were to apply a traditional (but unfortunately all too common!) configuration, the hotel would be running 10 SSIDs. Often, these are left to their default setup which means all SSIDs would run on all radios on all APs. This results in each AP broadcasting 20 SSIDs, and a conference room with 6 APs would have 120 ESSIDs beaconing!
Note: A common myth is that hidden SSIDs do not consume airtime. This is wrong. A hidden SSID simply does not broadcast its name, but it must still broadcast its presence and respond to probe requests so it is as polluting as a visible SSID.
We all know PSKs or Pre-Shared Keys, we use them at home, on our Mobile WiFi devices, and when tethering our smartphone to our laptop. With PSK-based security, a network has a single password and that password is used by all devices. The problem with this is that there is no way to identify one device from another, until now.
Ruckus’s Dynamic PSK feature allows you to have a single SSID with multiple PSKs. Or in other words, each device on the same SSID can have its own PSK.
In recent[1] software versions, Ruckus has extended this functionality to Group DPSK. Now, several devices can share a single PSK, and several groups can be present on the same SSID!
What’s more, each Group DPSK can be configured with its own VLAN, VLAN Pool and User Traffic Profile (for bandwidth rate limiting, ACL, Application Recognition and Control and URL filtering), so even though the groups are all connecting to the same SSID, each group can be as restricted or as open as the administrator wants them to be.
With per-Group DPSK VLAN, the groups are isolated from each other at Layer 2, while still being able to communicate amongst themselves.
The result will be as shown in the table below. Security is maintained and all services are still isolated from each other, but the number of SSIDs is less than half of what was originally defined, with lots of room to add more if needed.
[1] SmartZone OS 3.5 onwards. ZoneDirector only supports per-device DPSK, not Group DPSK.
Group DPSKs are set up in just 2 steps!