MRs broadcasting SSID during WAN outage - users cant use their personal hotspot

[Rajesh_KUMAR]

Hi everyone,

I'm running into a frustrating "black hole" Wi-Fi scenario during WAN outages and am looking for some advice or workarounds.

The Environment:

• Meraki MR access points broadcasting a corporate SSID.

• Standard laptops configured to prefer the corporate Wi-Fi.
  
  

The Issue: When our primary WAN link goes offline, the MRs lose connection to the Meraki Cloud but continue to aggressively broadcast the corporate SSID. Because the signal is strong, user laptops refuse to drop the connection. This traps users on a "dead" network with no internet access and prevents them from seamlessly failing over to their personal mobile hotspots, as their machines keep preferring the corporate Wi-Fi.

What I've Tried: I know the standard solution is to configure the APs to drop the SSID when they lose upstream connectivity. However, when I navigate to Wireless > Configure > Access control, the "Outage behavior" setting is completely missing from my dashboard. There is no option to set the APs to "Disable the SSID" or "Drop clients" upon losing connection to the cloud.

Are there any workarounds or best practices you use to force clients off the MRs during a hard WAN failure so they can use their hotspots?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

[alemabrahao]

This is the expected behavior.

[Rajesh_KUMAR]

Thanks for the reply

I know this is the expected behaviour as MRs keep working for LAN purpose, but we do not have any resources available locally on branches, all traffic has to go via WAN to datacentre and internet.
We cant turn of ports for remotre branches when the interent goes down. Right now the work around is we ask users to unplug the waps from the switch until the WAN link is back on. 

[ww]

I think the only way that a ssid stops broadcasting (automatically) is when you use the MR ssid to a mx tunnel concentrator. 

https://documentation.meraki.com/Wireless/Design_and_Configure/Configuration_Guides/Client_Addressin...

[PhilipDAth]

This is more of a core network design issue.  I think the key issue is a lack of circuit redundancy during a WAN outage.

You can use something like a Meraki MG with the MX for cellular failover (some models like the MX67C have it built in).

https://meraki.cisco.com/product-collateral/mg-cellular-gateways/?file

Starlink is also popular.

https://documentation.meraki.com/SASE_and_SD-WAN/MX/Design_and_Configure/Deployment_Guides/Meraki_an...

[Brash]

As has been said above, this is an expected behaviour.

There is no way to 'disconnect' the access point upon WAN failure.

Your best bet is to sure up your WAN connection with a more stable service or multi-WAN redundancy.