While in the midst of installing hardware for a new wifi deployment in a new building last month I came across these unknown devices.
Unknown devices mucking up the place
Until today I had no idea what they were, and hadn’t found time to go on site to track them down. The MAC addresses didn’t appear in any vendor OUI list I could find, and there were three of them. EA:2A:44, FA:28:19, and 66:6E:69.
Today the SSID “DIRECT-roku-215-203DF4” appeared beside one of them. AH HA!
The new building has at least five new televisions on each floor in conference rooms. I’m almost certain now that these are default state settings from these televisions.
Why is this bad?
- There are nine devices spewing RF on the same 5GHz channel (36)
- Signal levels that rival the APs providing wifi to the floor
- There’s another floor just like it below this one
- Three more floors below that going live in the next couple of months
Sounds like a recipe for obliterating channel 36 as a viable channel in any channel plan to me.
Now to make a road trip, verify the offending devices, and see if there’s anything that can be done to disable this setting.
Update: 2-13-2018
After a site visit and some wandering about the building with my Aircheck like Egon searching for ghosts, I was able to confirm that all the televisions with a “Roku” label on the front are indeed the culprit.
Now I wait to see if the installer can “fix” it, or if I need to smash all those new smart TVs with a hammer.