This is not meant to be a bash post or anything like that, but more of a “public service announcement” for anyone who might have to deal with this scenario in the future and cannot find a ton of info online; I know I couldn’t.
Background:
I was on a work-related call today regarding a project to bring in a vendor that was going to leverage the 5 GHz Wi-Fi channels that we typically leave out of our channel plans for their own autonomous Wi-Fi network to provide connectivity for their client devices. Those unused channels are in the UNII-2e (or UNII-2C for the initiated) band, specifically 112-132. That’s not a small amount of spectrum that we give up, but we do it as part of our partnership with vendors who need the spectrum in order to provide their own networks for their solutions. I know what you’re thinking… We picked those specific channels because traditionally they’ve been known to have more problems than others with DFS events, but I can neither confirm nor deny that! Those channels were selected before my time here so I’ll claim plausible deniability on that one :). Anyway, nothing new for us there and back to the story…
It was noted on the call that Meraki does not allow channels 116-132 to be used and my antennas (wireless pun) immediately went up. “Hold up, flag on the play! That CAN’T be right. Are you sure?” is what I was thinking to myself. Admittedly, while I have worked on some Meraki tasks and troubleshot a few things since starting here, I have not completely delved into the world of Meraki to say much, if anything, definitively about their solution. So I kept my mouth shut and scrambled to log into our Meraki dashboard, trying to confirm what was said by someone who wasn’t even on our team; surely they had to be mistaken. And then I saw it…