With the AP7 on the horizon, I will most likely end up with AP6 devices that will no longer be used. They are still good and would make for a perfect wifi sensor. If we could turn the APs into sensors that run tests on a schedule to give client side perspective of how the wifi service is, that would be a nice feature to have. Basically it would be like upgrading to the AP7 gets you a free dual band sensor. It would be nice to get metrics like:
- DNS lookup times
- DHCP tests including DHCP option info provided by the DHCP server like voice vlan or tftp server etc.
- HTTP(S) response times
- Speed tests
- Iperf tests for on site servers
- Streaming testing for sites like youtube or others that give buffer risk and quality estimates
- MSTeams, Zoom and others performance metrics
Observed signals in the area with signal levels and channel numbers
alert thresholds that would send email or notification if speed tests drop or Wi-Fi goes down.
while many of these features are already present from the Alta devices, A sensor would be able to be placed in areas that serve clients to get real world performance plus the ability to confirm and test new Wi-Fi configs remotely.
I’ve resulted in just home brewing my own (screenshots below) to run on a pi but SBC’s aren’t as cheap as they used to be and this could be a pretty cheap way to get value add for Alta I would think. I think most of the work with the testing has already been done, you would just need to convert the AP to client and put the Eth0 and WLAN interfaces in different net name spaces.
