We're really excited to begin rolling out new and improved wireless coverage throughout the Laboratory.  The new access points being deployed include support for Wireless N for faster speeds, and the access points themselves actually measure interference and can adapt their signals to improve coverage.   Coverage inside buildings will also improve in many areas that currently have signal-strength issues.

A few things will change when your building is upgraded:

  1. Employees using employee wireless (the one that requires authentication, not guest wireless) will be on a different subnet from the subnet in their building.  Currently, employee wifi users (a small number of people) are assigned an address within the same subnet as the one in their building.  This should have no impact on most users, but it could have an impact if you have set local firewall rules to only permit subnet-level connections and you're trying to connect between devices on the LAN and the employee wifi.  Solution: Adjust the firewall rules on the device.
  2. Some kinds of computer to computer communication on WiFi will no longer work.   Many devices engage in ongoing peer to peer discovery of the devices around them to make it easier to find local fileshares and printers.  These protocols will no longer function between systems on the wireless network.  In practice, this should have very limited impacts.  Printing and fileshares will continue to work as they always did, but the discovery of a new printer on wireless from another wireless host will no longer work automatically.  Again, most people will never ever encounter this issue.  AppleTV related protocols will still be permitted.   
  3. Outdoor coverage won't be as strong.  The access points are being tuned to maximize indoor coverage, and as a result, outdoor coverage in some areas may go down.  If you have a need for outdoor coverage in a specific area, please get in touch with us.
  4. A new wireless network, eduroam, will be available for use.  Please see our eduroam announcement for more details.

As we roll out upgrades, we'll keep track of them here and we'll let you know via email when your building is upgraded.  We'll also bug you to complete a quick survey after the upgrade to see if you've experienced the benefits of the new wireless - or experienced any problems.

Building Upgrade Status:

As of October 16, 2017

All LBL buildings have been completed WITH THE EXCEPTION OF: 

Building 17
Building 27
Building 33C
Building 53
Building 58, 58A

Scheduled:

All remaining buildings are expected to be completed by 31-Dec-2017.