PROSAFE Wireless Controller WFS709TP

Tired of managing the ever-growing number of access points across your organization? This wireless controller from NETGEAR tries to remove some pain out of the way

Saturday, July 05, 2008

As more and more Access Points are added to an organization's network, managing and monitoring them individually becomes a difficult task for a network administrator. This product acts as a single point control for network administrators to take care of all issues related to a wireless local area network, starting from planning the position of APs to monitoring and managing wireless networks. WFS709TP can support up to 16 Access Points (APs), 256 users and has PoE (Power over Ethernet) on all eight 10/100 interfaces. An additional Gigabyte Ethernet port is provided for connection to the organization's wired network. WFS709TP supports NETGEAR ProSafe 802.11a/g dual band light wireless AP and 802.11g light wireless AP; WG102 APs are also supported but with upgraded firmware. Organizations using APs from multiple vendors will face difficulty in using this product as non NETGEAR APs are not supported by this controller. IntelliFi RF Management is another interesting feature of WFS709TP that provides automatic self-configuration of all the radio parameters (channel, load balancing of traffic, etc). WFS709TP also supports low latency applications such as VOIP. Security features of WFS709TP include EAP-PEAP, EAP-TLS, EAP-TTLS, 802.1x, 802.11i, WPA, WPA-PSK, WPA2, WPA2-PSK, MAC address based filtering, and location based authentication. Another interesting feature of the device is the F planning tool where one can input building dimensions, number of floors and the coverage desired. This tool then recommends locations where APs can be placed for maximum coverage. One more security feature of this device is that it can detect rogue and interfering APs. We used this controller with two NETGEAR WG102 APs. The device we received didn't come with any manual or user guide, and while searching on the Net we didn't find any documentation about the product either. And as the device is packed with lots of features, which are manageable through a single web based interface, it is pretty difficult for a novice to understand and configure it for the first time. So our advice is that pls don't try to configure it on your own if you are not an expert on wireless networks.

The configuration and management of web interface can be accessed with a default address of 192.168.0.250 with 'admin' as user name and 'password' as password. We started the configuration of the device by first planning the WiFi layout with the help of the 'Plan' tab, where we entered the dimensions of our building. In return it gave us the locations where APs can be optimally placed.

There are two ways of connecting your APs to the network, either use a PoE or the AP with the standard power adapter and non PoE, Ethernet connection. We were able to use both without any trouble. Then we moved to the Configuration option which has two categories 'Basic' and 'Advanced,' the former for creating entry to new access points and latter for configuration of controller itself. Click on 'New' to create a new SSID. All you have to do is select the APs you want to connect with that SSID and you are done.

We used a single SSID for both APs for checking seamless migration. The results were very good and we were able to move freely between APs without a drop in connection. The range of APs was not affected by the controller. WFS709TP also acts as a monitoring tool and information about APs, both authentic and rogue can be seen in the 'Monitoring' tab. We tested for the interfering AP using the rogue AP detection feature. We created an AP with the same SSID as that of the authentic AP and configured it for the same channel; the controller was able to detect the interfering AP. Then we went one step ahead and created a rogue AP with the help of 'Airsnarf,' and the controller was again able to detect it. There were options to tag this interfering AP as rogue on the interface. We tagged interfering AP as rogue, then it started showing up in rogue list. There was one more option of disabling this rogue AP, we tried that option but the controller was not able to stop rogue AP and when we tried connecting again to the same SSID, it connected to the rogue one. Finally, we tested the performance of the device; it gave us 19Mbps of throughput which includes wired network delays and it took 44 seconds to transfer a 50 MB file.

Bottomline: A power-packed single device that has all the features to effectively support wireless networks of a small workgroup.

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