4ipnet Blog: All About Wireless Networking

Traditionally, enterprises prefer to tunnel all the wireless traffic from branch offices back to the central controller at the headquarters, in order to maintain unified security and access policies. However, this also increases bandwidth consumption and latency, decreasing overall network performance. With 4ipnet’s solution, you now have a compromise. Different tunnel types can be configured independently for each SSID, providing maximum deployment flexibility. For instance, the employee SSID can continue to tunnel all the traffic back to the controller, while the guest SSID can be configured with split tunnel – tunneling only authentication, management, and accounting traffic back to the controller, and allowing user data traffic to exit locally to the Internet. With split tunnel, users get the best network experience, while the company can also reduce unnecessary bandwidth consumption from users that do not need such tight security policies.

In many layer 3 AP deployments, network administrators choose to tunnel all of the network traffic back to the central controller for security purposes. However, this can consume a lot of unnecessary bandwidth and induce additional latency. With the split tunnel architecture of 4ipnet’s solution, management, authentication, and accounting traffic are tunneled from the APs to the controller, while the user data traffic is forwarded out locally to the Internet. Users will get the best network experience, and the Wi-Fi provider will also minimize consumed bandwidth without sacrificing authentication and management functionality.