Vacation Wi-Fi Observations

Whilst on a week of skiing in Austria I couldn't help but noticing the poor state of Wi-Fi configuration is an issue over there. On arriving at the airport in Salzburg I was immediately struck by the orientation of the dipole antennas on the Cisco (3800 I think) APs. As you can see below they were tilted at 45 degrees in two directions.

Best practise is for all antennas to be in the same orientation; in this case vertically and Cisco even state this here and here

The other Wi-Fi problem I noticed was that in our hotel there was a Ubiquiti wireless network. A quick look on Wifi Analyzer showed that all the APs were configured on the same channel on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands even though there were almost no neighbouring networks to interfere. At least the channel widths were sensible. Perhaps the same configuration was applied to all the APs. Surprisingly the Wi-Fi performance from a user perspective wasn't all that bad... Just goes to show that whatever poor configuration we commit sometimes Wi-Fi just works.