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jdanaFlag for United States of America

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Switching over from WEP to WPA

Here's the scenario:

We have an office wireless network with which 10 to 20 of our guests connect every day using a variety of client devices, including laptops (Windows and Mac OS X), iPads, and smart phones.
We are not responsible in any shape or form for our guest's wireless configurations. In many ways, we're like a coffee shop. People sit down at one of our tables with an endless number of wireless configurations and expect to connect to our wireless network.
We've deliberately left our wireless access points configured with WEP for two reasons: 1) We have hundreds (if not thousands) of clients with our current SSID saved with the WEP security protocol. 2) Some of our clients have really old laptops.
Time to switch over to WPA2 long overdue. Here's the question, how much pain will our guests experience with their client devices?
Do we consider implementing a brand-new SSID to force our guest's client devices to create (and save) and brand new connection?
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Steven Carnahan
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It sounds like you are only providing wireless to the internet correct?

Why not invest in a router that provides a guest account similar to hotels.

We have implemented a small scale version in our office to provide visitors that need internet access either to provide presentations or auditors to have access to the internet without giving them access to our internal network.  We simply provide them with the name of the network for them to connect to and the password for the guest account. We change that password regularly.

We don't have a large amount of guests so we went with the low end Cisco EA2700.
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ASKER

Agreed. We're going to accomplish it via UNIFI access points (http://www.ubnt.com/unifi).
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ASKER

The question, remains, however, how much pain is an office guest going to experience if the access point associated with their saved wireless network connection switches over from WEP to WPA2?
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Steven Carnahan
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Thanks!