Wireless Access

This problem probably isn't even related to the equipment, but I thought this was the best place to ask since my wireless is procurve based.

As in the post I have a dorm with an MSM710 controller and 6 MSM422 AP's (2 per floor) . I have basically the same setup in our main campus except with MSM430 AP's. Works without fail in the main campus.  To test I've brought in one of those 430's and acutally tried a smaller 410. Same thing

Here's the behavior:

It's a fairly standard building, hallway down the center with rooms on either side of the hallway. The AP's are mounted below the plenum in the hallway. Signal strength for the most part is good in the hallway. When passing past the threshold of a room the performance just drops significantly. The signal strength doesn't necessarily drop, but as you go further into the room away from an AP it does begin to drop.   I've talked to HP (I guess level 1) tech support, they confirmed the config was right. When looking at the port status page of any AP the errors, both Tx and Rx, on Wireless port 1( I only have one radio on, 2.4 Ghz) are extremely high.  The HP techs seemed to want to look at the physical side of the network based on this information. There are like 4 ports identified in that section: LAN, Wireless port 1, Wireless port 2, Bridge. It would seem to me that if the physical network were the problem the errors would be showing up on the LAN port. Since the errors were on a Wireless port it would seem to me to be RF related.  

This all seems to be related to RF interference.  But I suppose it's possible the ethernet cabling itself is getting interference. (cat 6 UTP). 

All the AP's and the MSM 710 are connected to a Layer 2 managed Procurve PoE switch. Can't recall teh model ATM. From there it takes 2 hops up to the gateway. Physical performance from this swtch out to the internet is phenomenal. 

At this point I'm not sure what to test.

-Josh

Hi,

To see you have bad wifi signal causing low speed, you can connect a client and run iperf, you go into the Wireless client page where you can see the actual data rate exchanged between the client and the AP.  You can also inspect the client-AP SNR, anything below 15dB is bad.

As you run iperf, try to reset the stats before the test, you can run iperf at different distance from the AP to see how the stats behave.

Also the MSM430 is much more advance in term of wifi chipset than the one used on  MSM410 and MSM422.  Let put it this way, the MSM430 is the Cadillac, the others AP are the Corolla (no offense), just using the car thing to get my point.

The MSM430 much more sensitive in RX.

Cheers