Have any of you had a chance to play with the Google Chromecast and thought about what issues it might create for wireless in residence halls when students bringing them back to school with them and connect them to the network?
Its broadcasts an SSID when it's first connected for setup. Like wireless printers my assumption was that this would create interference with our 2.4Ghz network until the student finishes setting up the chromecast. After that the SSID goes away, and so should the interference.....at least that's what I thought until I was using inSSIDer this afternoon at home, and noticed that I saw an SSID called Livingroom Chromecast (That's the name of my chromecast at home). The SSID was there for a few minutes and then went away again. Maybe 20-30 minutes later, I saw it show up again for a few minutes and then go away. I can't imagine what its trying to accomplish with this behavior. Anyone have any insights? My original thinking was that we'd need to make sure that chromecasts got set up and weren't plugged in and left unconfigured, but that after that they wouldn't cause wireless network problems. Watching this rogue ssid come and go, makes me wonder if we're headed for disaster if lots of students have chromecasts. Moving from the realm of technological problems to people problems, I think students may annoy each other by playing media to the tv's of others. There's no password or prompt to stop it, whoever requests to send a stream to the tv last sends their stream to the tv. -- *Adam Forsyth* Director of Network and Systems Luther College Library and Information Services * 700 College Drive Decorah, IA 52101 563-387-1402 * ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
