cisco wireless & wifi speakers

[marikelis47]

We have a cisco wireless network on our campus. Recently, a department bought a pair of Sonos speakers to put on the wifi wanting to use the app to push music through.

The pairing of the speakers and APP would not work. After a long time with support and getting to the second tier it was explained that the sonos produces broadcasts for the app to find. Since we do not have broadcast forwarding enabled, this is why the pairing was not working.

In looking through the sonos and some cisco forums I noticed that other places that ran into the issue just went ahead and enable broadcast forwarding on their controllers to get this to work. IMO it is not worth it to do this with running the risk of saturating the airspace.

Am I being too over cautious?

Its also too bad that cisco does not make this a per interface/wlan feature as opposed to global.

Is there alternatives out their that are better suited for enterprise wireless?

[marce1000]

 - If you would need the APP only for provisioning the speakers , could you then for instance use mobile hotspot feature on your phone , perhaps it can then work further on in the standard company wireless environment.

 M.

[Scott Fella]

As for anything, test it out.  Get a baseline of your environment using various tools and then enable the feature and see what the difference is from the baseline.  Every environment is different and many have run into issues when wireless devices get introduced into enterprise that is really designed for home or smb.