How to get our SSID to show up with so many other SSID broadcasting?

[Astronotus]

6 Story building, it's a rectangular design, 30 units on each floor, 15 units per side, floors 2-5, the bottom floor is comprised of all offices.  150 apartment units total, all full of people. See my attachment below of the screenshot I took using Meraki Air Marshall, in our Meraki management portal. 

 Using Meraki MR56 APs. 

 When initially adding OURSSID  to my devices, I had to add it manually because there were over 900 SSID's broadcasting at any given time from the people that live in the apartments,  around our building, and the businesses that are located around our building, sometimes I could see over 2200 SSID in the listed in Air Marshall that have nothing to do with our network.

Standing 1' away from an AP I could not see our SSID for a while and when it would show up, it would quickly go away, because so many SSIDs from other networks (that are NOT ours) are constantly populating the available SSID field, and this is all devices that we tried, including iPhones, iPads, Android phones, Windows Laptop, Macbook Air laptops, etc.  The signal strength is very good, but we all know that signal strength isn't everything, and managing overlapping channels is an integral part of the equation in densely populated areas like this.  This may be a record for me personally?  Even on large college campuses and in Dorms, or student housing I have not seen this many active SSID's on both 2.4 & 5Ghz channels. 

The problem is, not for me or my technical team but for residents in this building. Many people, some just not technical need to be able to easily add the Wireless SSID to their devices.  But with so many other, non-related, private SSIDs, what's the best solution? Meraki has some great tools, but I think we need to figure this out or the help desk will be getting a lot of calls, having people ask them to help them manually enter the SSID, and then there's the Authentication method with WPA/2/3  before you are required to type in the password. Then, what is going to happen when we do our quarterly password-change?  haha 

My team was the implementation team, we did not perform the initial survey or create the design. 

So, that said, are there too many other SSID's in the scenario to realistically be able to easily add our SSID?  It begs the question, how many SSID's is too much?  Does Meraki have a solution that can be configured to tackle this? 

We have installed many wireless networks over the last 15 years, and I have never seen so many SSID's and over-lapping channels, even in high-rise buildings with many other companies. I think much of is also due to pedestrians walking by outside on the sidewalks, and people driving by in their cars, the bus line etc. etc with hotspots broadcasting.

Even if we can agree that this is too many SSID's then I think I could be convinced of this? 

Cheers All, 

M

[Scott Fella]

The less the better. In enterprise you want 3 or less. I don’t see a need to have an SSID per room. Treat it like a hotel. 1 ssid for all. 

[Astronotus]

Allow me to clarify. 

The SSID's are all from separate entities in the apartment from people that live within the building as well as neighbors and local businesses. They're all listed within AirMarshall.

Cheers,

MT

[balaji.bandi]

Not sure why you need so many SSID,

Wireless deployment :

1. Make sure the site survey is done before installing.

2. Place to AP in the right place so the SSID can be visible

3. You do not need so many SSID, which is complex for a small place like you mentioned.

4. start with minimal SSID setup and improve the quality of service.

5. you can identify the user based on authentication (depends on what system you use).

[Leo Laohoo]

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@balaji.bandi wrote:

Not sure why you need so many SSID,

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Think of a large retirement apartment complex.  Each resident has a wireless modem.  

He wants to know how to get someone he knows to easily pick the correct SSID from a list of broadcasting SSID.

[Haydn Andrews]

Two things I can think of to help get the SSID onto the devices:

MDM Solution so its hard coded into the device

Open roaming (With the open roaming profile already configured)

From a practical point of view its probably worth if you own the building trying to get everyone to turn down the TX power on their access points.

[Arshad Safrulla]

Whatever the SSID's picked up by Air Marshall uses the dedicated WIDS/WIPS radio. This radio is really sensitive and can pick up RF signals from very far away from your physical network (Most of the Management & Control frames are transmitted at the lowest possible data rate which means more distance than client serving AP's and if you are deploying dedicated sensors recommendation is 1 scanning AP per 5 client serving AP's, this should give you an idea of the radio sensitivity) .

And also from the screen shot you shared it seems like whatever the rogue SSID's picked up by your AP's are not seen very recently. I would say don't really worry about what you see under Air Marshall (of course if the network is not mission critical)

[JPavonM]

The only thing I can think to help users to pick the right SSID is to use a QR-Code like this:
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/wi-fi-qr-code-generator-using-python/

For Windows laptops they should use a 3rd-party application like WiFi QR Code Scanner.

The other way is to manually create the connection profile which is not so user friendly at all sometimes.

HTH
-Jesus
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[Rich R]

A popular option which sometimes helps is to prefix the SSID with underscore so you use _OURSSID instead of OURSSSID.

But of course that is dependent on device behaviour so is still no guarantee that your SSID will be at/near the top of the list.

Agreed with the others that looking at Air Marshall historical list is a bit pointless - who cares if somebody walked/drove past 12 hours ago with a personal hotspot enabled.

Otherwise like others said you need to onboard the devices with a profile to pre-configure the devices.

If you're using a pre-shared key and changing it every few months in this environment then sounds like you're setting yourself up for disaster and should be looking at a proper 802.1x or passpoint solution anyway.