Roaming Wifi Network at 52 Unit Apartment Project

[brwainer]

@dfriestedt

The more I think about this the more I’m rethinking my goals. In all honesty, what I’m trying to do is establish a building wide wifi network that is unique to each user (which is different than my original question / post). I envision the tenant walking into the building and having wifi in all areas of the building. From the main lobby to the halls to the unit. The tenant in Unit 201 would be on vlan 201 everywhere. When the tenant goes into the unit they can connect their wired devices to any one of the 4 LAN points in each unit (which would be on vlan 201) and they can connect their wireless devices to the WAP in their unit on vlan 201. The wireless connections within the unit (from a printer or TV) should not use a captive portal. They need a SSID and PW.

Herein lies the rub. I think I can assign vlan 201 via captive portal when the tenant walks into the building. They can roam everywhere as expected on vlan 201. However, when they get into their unit, how do they connect a wireless printer or TV over the captive portal? They would need a std SSID / PW on vlan 201. That then requires 52 SSID on all WAP, which is why I was thinking WLAN Groups instead…

This is where RADIUS and Dynamic VLAN come into play. The wireless printers and TVs which can’t do a portal get registered into RADIUS by their MAC address. But this can’t be done just with Unifi - you need a lot of server side programming to make the portal register users and devices into the RADIUS server with the correct config. I’m not aware of any premade system for this - the companies that do this for large numbers of apartment complexes and/or hotels have all made their own bespoke systems (I used to work for one).