Fast Transition – Mac-WiFi

8 April 2021

How to verify whether 802.11k and 11r are enabled (via a capture)

I was chatting with my old colleague and friend Vince Folk from Vocera recently when he challenged me to name the Information Elements you would find 802.11k/r settings in.

Immediately my smugness shot to Maximum because this is something I’m very familiar with, you might even have seen my WLPC EU 2019 video analysing 802.11k/r/v. However, as the biotic hamsters in my dusty shell of a skull scurried around trying to find the grey matter holding this information my smugness waned.

When Vince finally put me out of my misery the IE names did not ring a bell with me. Not a single one! So the only reasonable course of action was to blog about it, to cement it into the aforementioned grey matter, and hopefully help someone else out too.

30 September 201912 February 2020

802.11r Fast Transition not working in your Cisco home lab?

I wanted to test out and analyse Fast Transition in my Cisco home lab but at the first attempt it did not work – the clients were doing full Dot1X authentication each roam. Everything on the SSID/WLAN looked correct, and the clients were connecting/roaming ok, so it wasn’t a certificate or security setting issue.

Thankfully it didn’t take long to figure it out, but I wanted to put this short post together so that hopefully it takes you even less time.

26 July 201917 November 2020

Cisco’s 802.11r/FT settings & Adaptive mode explained

I see questions come up more and more often around Cisco’s Fast Transition settings (aka FT or 802.11r). In particular mixing non-FT and FT clients on the same SSID, and the role of Adaptive mode. I myself totally misunderstood how their FT Adaptive mode worked until two weeks ago.

There is an awesome culture within Vocera of doing as much as we can to provide guidance to our customers, even when that means providing assistance on another vendors equipment. One such opportunity occurred two weeks ago when a customer wanted to use our voice clients with Fast Transition (the IEEE’s feature name for the 802.11r amendment), but had older Cisco phones on the same SSID that do not support FT. We spun up our lab to test it out and these are the findings.