The Hidden Terminal Mystery
HPE Aruba (Enterprise Client)
Situation
A major enterprise customer experienced intermittent wireless drops every 30 minutes. The frustrating part: RSSI looked excellent everywhere. Traditional troubleshooting showed no issues. The client was losing confidence and considering ripping out the Aruba infrastructure.
Task
I needed to find the root cause of these phantom disconnections that correlated with nothing visible in standard monitoring tools. The customer had already spent months troubleshooting with their internal team.
Action
I went beyond standard tools and brought in a software-defined radio (SDR) to do deep spectrum analysis. After hours of monitoring, I detected elevator motor interference at 5.8 GHz — a classic hidden terminal problem where the interference source was invisible to the APs but devastating to clients. I then implemented dynamic Clear Channel Assessment (CCA) tuning that would adapt in real-time when the interference appeared.
Result
The dynamic CCA tuning eliminated the disconnections entirely. This approach was documented as a best practice and reduced similar escalations by 70% across the organization. The customer renewed their contract for another 3 years.