Tenant Wireless

[ppellettiere]

We currently have an office building with company employees using the our wireless infrastructure.

We are going to start leasing some of the open space to tenants and we are going to offer wireless connectivity. Does anyone know where I can find documentation on best practices and configuration for this type of setup?

[gamccall]

Isolate, isolate, isolate. Use VRF or PBR or, at the very least, terminate the customer vlan(s) on your firewall rather than your core router, and set up good ACLs everywhere. Use a completely different address space for your tenants if possible- i.e. if you're using network 10 put all their stuff in 192.168, or whatever. Rate limit to make sure they don't choke your pipe- and, if you feel like it, so that you don't choke theirs. Figure out how security will be handled and who'll be responsible for maintaining their user directory.

[ppellettiere]

Thanks for the good information- I do have 1 more question..

SSIDs- I don't want to flood the network with Beacons. Is there a way to use 1 SSID with different networks or can I use MbSSIDs and segregate them?

[gamccall]

How many SSIDs are you looking at? If it's just two or three, I wouldn't worry about beacon volume at all. If it's more like 20, you have a challenge to work with.

Using RADIUS, you can force users into different VLANs based on RADIUS attributes regardless of which SSID they connected on. So that's an option... but without extensive testing I'm not sure I'd rely on the security of that sort of implementation.

[ppellettiere]

Right now for our employees we use 4 SSIDs

I didn't want to go that much higher. I would like to add just one more SSID for the tenants and isolate the address space we would assign them.

[gamccall · Accepted solution]

One more should be fine. You could experiment with increasing the beacon interval to reduce to total volume of beacons, but I wouldn't mess with that unless you observe problems.

I think 7 is the most SSIDs I've put on one AP, and performance was not noticeably impacted.

[Leo Laohoo · Accepted solution]

Are you going to "share" your AP's with your clients?

You can enable some AP's to broadcast your employees-only SSID and/or tenant SSID using AP Groups (WLAN > Advanced > AP Groups).

[ppellettiere]

Yes we are going to share the AP's. So we would want to setup the AP Groups.

We'll have to figure out which way we want to go with the broadcast.

Thanks for the information.