Protecting sensitive data from neighboring WLANs on the same channel

Protecting sensitive data from neighboring WLANs on the same channel

We have customers who share building space with other health care professionals. For obvious reasons we make certain the networks are secure and private. We have run into a situation as a result of the proliferation of wireless access points, where our wireless laptops and tablets are attempting to connect to rouge access points that been installed in nearby offices, with no forethought for other networks and they are transmitting on the same channel. We lock our access points down by MAC and do not transmit the SSID, so they cannot connect to our network, but our end devices are trying to connect to these rouge networks and causing problems running applications. Any suggestions?

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It seems like the best solution would be to consider changing your WLAN channel, and setting up your WLAN clients to only talk on that specific channel with your specific SSID. Refer to your documentation or contact your vendor if you're having trouble doing this.

This was first published in May 2004