{"id":713,"date":"2018-12-06T11:30:37","date_gmt":"2018-12-06T16:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/badger-fi.com\/?p=713"},"modified":"2018-12-06T11:30:37","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T16:30:37","slug":"distantbeacons-part1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.badger-fi.com\/?p=713","title":{"rendered":"Distant Beacons – Part 1 – One Size Sail For Every Ship?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note – Lighthouse image was used with permission from Ranveig Marie Photography.\u00a0 Check out her stuff here:\u00a0 Instagram<\/a>, Facebook<\/a>, and Flickr<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

This post will serve as part one of a multipart post concerning recent happenings involving client settings, client behavior, what was done to tune a network, and the results thereafter.<\/p>\n

Chromebooks have been around for several years now and love them or hate them, they are here to stay.\u00a0 Chromebooks began as a low cost consumer device but have since crept their way into the enterprise, as well as established a strong foothold in the K12 vertical.\u00a0 What originally seemed like a cheap compute option, is now available in many different hardware options, many times offering “better than decent” performance for an affordable price.\u00a0 Don’t be fooled though, there are plenty of Chromebook devices out there that sport less than desirable performance but rep a very attractive price tag.\u00a0 This initial post explains my desire to get a better understanding of Chromebooks and their behavior on my beloved wireless network.<\/p>\n

We currently have tens of thousands of Chromebooks in our Google Domain that are owned and managed by our school district.\u00a0 We recently reached over 80,000 concurrent wireless devices on our network and ChromeOS serves as a sizable percent of that number,\u00a0 steadily creeping towards surpassing iOS.\u00a0 Most of the time everything works great but when there are issues reported, you can bet there is a very good chance the device in question is a Chromebook.\u00a0 Known issues in the past have been cleared up by Google in relatively short order.\u00a0 Other times, issues linger on and off, coming and going like the ebb and flow of an ocean tide.\u00a0 In the recent past our district standardized on a specific manufacturer and model of Chromebook that would be purchased and supported by our department staff.\u00a0 Many people were brought together to make sure the device met and exceeded our expectation for an exceptional user experience.\u00a0 Keep in mind there are several thousand other Chromebook devices still on our network which are either legacy holdover or BYOD devices.\u00a0 Ironically, despite the vast differences, many of the Chromebooks exhibit similar behaviors.\u00a0 This post will go on to explain my thoughts as to why this may be.<\/p>\n

To get a better understanding of Chromebook behavior on wireless networks, I decided to collect data on my own.\u00a0 This was done to see if I could correlate behaviors with known issues.\u00a0 I decided to create a simple form<\/a>\u00a0on my blog that asked for a few pieces of information easily obtained from a Chromebook with a few commands.\u00a0 The following information is what I was interested in:<\/p>\n