Wireless Access

Wondering if anyone have a solution to this. I am trying to run our access points as b/g(Radio2)2.4ghz and a/n(Radio1) 5ghz, And have a problem with clients, They always seem to connect to G Radio instead of connecting to N radio thats faster.

The reason for having both is support for older devices that need G.

I have tried this with Windows XP clients And Windows 7, and all of them prefer to connnect to G.
Is there a way to force n clients to only conenct to N ?

Thanks

b/g works with 2.4ghz and n/a works with 5ghz, are you sure the clients support 5ghz ??

Yes the clients work fine with N if i turn the G radio off.
Its just as soon as i turn the G radio on the client seem to prefer to connect to that.

Majority of our clients is Hp mini netbooks 5101

The only thing sofar that i can think it is is its auto connecting to the strongest single rather than the fastest. because G 2.4 will be traveling trough walls better than N 5ghz.

So signal might be marginally lower on n but still faster speed.

yes what you have mentioned is the reason.

You can try to change the power in Radio 2 (reduce it) so that Radio 1 will have stronger signal. (for testing)

I have tried reducing to 50%, but they still connected to G. Surely G cant be that much stronger trough one brick wall.

I will try reduce maby to 20%

Reduced it to 20%, seems to be running ok. allthough G is still stronger in some places.

I might have To create a alternate SSID for the G network, that might be the best way?

I had to create two SSID's (VSC's) one for N and one for G, or like a previous post recommended reduce the power to radio 2. Note that I did get a little confused, at one point, wen my G clients we only connecting at 54mbps - until i realized they were actually connecting to radio 1 using a. that was when I had only one SSID for both radios. I'm sure you aint as daft as me though.

Yeah thanks, They are connecting to G have checked.
Gone the way of creating two SSID`s, as i had to reduce the power on radio two so much before clients didnt connect to G. Its like Windows 7 is programmed, or the wireless chipset to prefer G over N.

It is working fine now.

Thanks

This is related the driver implementation.
Some chip set organization have implemented a way that 5 Ghz is preferred over 2.4 Ghz.
It's not so it's solely looking at the signal strength, with the cheaper cards it is.
concluding it's very much depending on the implementation of the driver of your Wi-Fi card.
I know with some vendors you can even choose which technology is preferred of the other. (802.11n over 802.11g for example)

What you know see happening in the market is that AP hardware vendors are introducing features like bandsteering.
This means that the AP will wait longer on a client to respond to the sent out management and beacon frames and based on the preference set inside the configuration of the AP steer the client to this standard.
What i mean with this, normally a client will respond to the first available beacon and join, often this means your Wlan card will start the scan at 2.4 Ghz find a network and join this and thus not doing a initial scan at 5 Ghz which is inside the capability of your WLAN card.
With bandsteering (set to 5 Ghz preferred) the AP will wait long on the capabilities of the client and not directly respond the associating request of the client, but also sent out an beacon on the 5 Ghz to see if the client response if it does reconnect at 5 Ghz.

Perhaps HP could implement this band-steering feature soon.

Best regards,

Mike Hydra

If your laptop has intel5300 chipset, there is a registry key RecommendedBand , this config key is not exposed to the Advance config tab.
The default value is 0 (2.4), I have tried to put to 1 (5Ghz) and and seem to prefer 5Ghz radio but not all the time, however I saw more connections to 5Ghz.

You need to regedit and find this key to change it.

When you change the registry value, do a Disable and Enable of your device so the driver will reload and look for the new config.

Also others vendors like cisco/aruba have bandsteering but disable by default, because this cause delay for voice.

Z273