Getting to Know Your Wireless Access Point
An increasing number of classrooms and work areas have a wireless access point (AKA "AP") in them. They are usually mounted on the ceiling or wall and visible. In some cases, yours may be mounted above the ceiling and not visible.Most wireless access points have a status light on them. This light should be solid green or solid blue.
If the light is off or flashing or any other color, then there is likely something wrong with the AP or Tech Services is performing remote maintenance on it, and a help desk ticket should be created. Please be sure to include the room the AP is in.
You may occasionally see the lights briefly flashing during emergency maintenance or after a power outage. Tech Services tries to avoid performing any maintenance during instructional hours that would cause a WAP to go offline. But this should only happen for a brief period of time, no longer than 5 minutes.
Good:
Solid green means the AP is online and ready to serve wireless clients.
Solid blue means the AP is online and currently has wireless clients connected to it.
Note: You may not see your WAP light turn solid blue. In most cases, this is okay! The wireless system spreads (load balances) wireless clients across nearby WAPs for a huge variety of reasons.
Bad:
Off is bad and means the access point is not operational.
Flashing any color for more than 5 minutes means the access point is not operational.
Any solid color other than green or blue is bad and means the access point is not operational.
Caveats:
Some older access points (1602i) have a frustratingly different color scheme. They flash green when they are online, and are solid green when they have clients connected. This is incredibly frustrating, I am sorry. The vendor did this as a "cost-cutting" measure. We are phasing these models out. The model in question looks like this:
In some cases, you may have wireless clients in your classroom, but the access point is a solid green and not blue. The wireless access points are designed to spread the clients across other nearby wireless access points to reduce the load on any single AP.
Some of the older dark gray access points will display blinking lights and lights of various colors as part of their normal operation. You should not see these anymore. If you see one of these at a site, report it to Tech Services so it can be replaced. They look like this:
