Wireless Access

Hi Everyone,

 

We have just released about 350 MacBooks to half of our high school campus. We are experiencing connectivity problems on some access points. Some APs are getting 60+ clients, while others 45-60' away are getting only a couple of clients.

 

The district has four campuses all fibered back to a central data center. The data center houses (1) MSM760 controller running 5.7.2.0-12736. This controller is used to push out configurations only to the APs throughout the district. Wireless clients data does not travel back through the controller. We have (80) MSM422 APs and (10) MSM430 APs across all four campuses.

 

The high school campus has (32) of the above MSM422 APs and (2) of the MSM430 APs. 

 

The MacBooks were issued to half of the students on the campus. So these are primarily on one side of the campus. We have added more APs in this area. We have (24) of the above APs located on this side of the campus.

 

We are experiencing quite a few issues with getting network access and extremely slow access on the MacBooks when they are used in a classroom setting. I have looked at the controller and at times we have 60+ clients connected to one AP, but only a couple to another one that is located within 45-60'. Of the (24) APs in this area I have had about three that consistantly have 40-45 clients while the rest always have between 0 and 15.

 

I have both radios active on the MSM422s. One operates N at 5GHz and the other B/G at 2.4GHz. For some reason the APs are not load balancing, so to speak. If I take one of the Macs to another area of campus, I have no issues.

 

Does anyone have any ideas as to what I can try to relieve some of the APs? 

 

Thanks,

K

At the AP level, you can set the MAX # of clients that will be allowed to connect. So you can TRY and load balance that way. I typically set my MSM 430/460 APs to 75 clients MAX at each radio. For the MSM 422s, you might need to set the 2.4GHz radio for 30 Max or so, if you're experiencing issues. Code 6.0.1.0 has some auto-load-balancing features, but I'm not sure if they would even work with the 422 models. They might be too old?? Besides that, I'm having issues with the 6.0.1.0 code at a few customers so I'm not too keen on running it in production yet.

Also, another thing that can REALLY help is to turn OFF broadcasting on the VSCs, and even turning off client-to-client communication. Apple devices can be really chatty with Bonjour kicking in.