Periodically, you may need to change WiFi passwords for a variety of reasons - typically because more people are using a network than you intended. There are essentially 3 ways to approach this:
- Literally just "change the password". The problem with a "hard cut" approach is that everything breaks at once, you have to change all devices at once, and if you run into issues, or devices you forgot were wireless (or aren't on the site at the time of the cut), there can be a "long trail of destruction" left in the wake of such a change.
- Add a new SSID (WiFi Network) with the new password that's tied to the same underlying network, move things gradually over days/weeks so that we can monitor what is still connected the old network before making the decision to shut down. It has the added benefit of inherently having a good fallback plan. If you find a couple of devices that are broken after the old network is shutdown and you can't reconfigure them easily, we can re-enable the old network to allow more time to get that completed.
- Finally, you can move to an "Enterprise" network setup. This is similar to option #2, but adds usernames and passwords so that you can manage access on a username by username basis to make password changes less necessary/impactful for the future. This has some great advantages, but a major drawback is that some consumer devices don't support them (inkjet printers and TVs in particular are bad about this). There are also problems with older versions of Windows accepting the certificates that are necessary for WPA2 Enterprise. As a result, we usually only recommend this setup for multi-tenant facilities, where you have more than a couple of networks that need to be accessed by different people at the same time.
To make the change, just let us know which approach you'd like to take and the name (and password, if you like) of the new network you'd like to add if applicable, and we'll help you make it happen!