Should we be suffering from connectivity problems due to having a hidden SSID?
At work, we're past the "Hidden SSIDs make our network more secure" argument, but for user's 'convenience' and in order to make it less confusing with our other broadcasted SSIDs, we've added a hidden SSID to our wireless controller (for the use mostly of network admins). We've noted a couple of disconnects, and would like to know if there are some known performance/reliability implications for this kind of setup, particularly with multiple access points with the same SSID on our site.
Does having a hidden SSID on an access point affect connectivity?
Best Answer
This is a hardware issue (or a software issue with some hardware vendors). I've suffered this problem on my wireless networks. I too run one of my wireless networks with a "hidden SSID" and have had some issues with it. I know for a fact that our older G4/G5 based Mac OS X machines will not stay connected to a hidden SSID network. I've also experienced the problem with some older Linksys wireless cards on various versions of Windows. Other cards and PC's have no problem with it. I've got several machines that have worked flawlessly on it without a hiccup. Most of these are newer machines from Dell or have newer wireless cards including newer Linksys cards (which leads me to believe it's probably a wireless chipset issue but I don't have enough to prove it).