Patchy wi-fi at ACCC despite access point expansion

Australia’s competition watchdog is hoping a heat mapping exercise will get to the bottom of wi-fi performance problems at its offices, which are occurring despite a major expansion of access points.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) revealed the issues in a Buy-ICT notice.

“Recently, wi-fi performance issues [have] been reported with connection dropout, poor connectivity and unreliable signal strength,” the commission said.

“The agency requires an audit of its wi-fi network performance [and] reliability, [to] identify gaps in coverage, and improvements.”

Only last year, the commission deployed 60 new wireless access points across its footprint of nine offices.

The deployment was made “to improve user experience and wireless connectivity”, the ACCC said.

It brought the total number of access points it operates up to 168 - meaning there was a 55 percent increase in the number of access points over the past year.

The commission said its wide area network utilises “HPE Routers Aruba WLAN infrastructure and HP Procurve switching hardware”.

The network is rated to an “OFFICIAL: Sensitive” classification.

An ACCC spokesperson declined to address specific questions from iTnews as to its troubleshooting so far, including whether problems were more acute in certain locations, the nature of any vendor or integrator support it might have received to date and whether problems elsewhere in the network had been ruled out.

“Our practice is to not comment on agency procurements that are in progress and not finalised,” the ACCC spokesperson said.

“This ensures fairness to all parties throughout the procurement process.”