We were seeing the same thing Jim mentioned- Macs clinging like grim death to anemic 11a cells when better 11g was available. The Apple tech note for fixing the condition said along the lines of "... in your AirPort base station, disable the 11a radio" as if Macs were never used in the Enterprise. I think the last couple of code upgrades may have reversed this, if memory serves. In our Cisco LWAPP, we do see better trends of late- and hear less complaints from the Mac folks on newer wireless drivers. Would be nice if Apple did the CCX thing, at least for Cisco shops.
Lee Lee H. Badman Wireless/Network Engineer Information Technology and Services Syracuse University 315 443-3003 -----Original Message----- From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jim Galiardi Sent: Monday, October 06, 2008 5:56 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Macs prefer b/g over a? Julian, That's not a problem we've run into yet <insert sound of knocking on wood>. In fact we've seen the opposite from time to time with clients in some of our older b/g only infrastructure buildings preferring the 802.11a from the building next door. If you guys are an Aruba house and running 3.3.2.5 there's some new features within that may help. Specifically bandsteering. The Aruba folks were just up here for a demo/proof of concept of this and it worked really well. Unfortunately I need to get my infrastructure to 3.3 before I can take advantage of it. But it may be what you are looking for. The Farpoint group's whitepaper gives a good overview of these features and can be found here: http://www.arubanetworks.com/pdf/technology/whitepapers/wp_arm.pdf Good Luck! ___________________________________ Jim Galiardi Network Specialist, Network Systems UW Technology University of Washington (206)616-0397 Box 354150 -----Original Message----- From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Julian Y. Koh Sent: Monday, October 06, 2008 6:50 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Macs prefer b/g over a? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 09:35 -0400 10/6/2008, Philippe Hanset wrote: >Has anyone found a way to force Macs to prefer >802.11a over 802.11b/g? > >We provide in places with high wireless demand 802.11a in addition >to 802.11b/g, but Macs never seem to join 802.11a (except in a few random >cases) We've been working on similar issues with Aruba, and they claim that there is a known issue with Mac OS X clients in terms of frequency band selection. Supposedly according to Apple, clients with Mac OS X 10.5.3 and higher should prefer the 5GHz band over the 2.4GHz band. But there are still a bunch of other things going on that we're working on characterizing. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 9.8.3.4028 wj8DBQFI6heDDlQHnMkeAWMRAuiAAJ0dS6b/tpxdLM/PmRkt2Uh8BdbERwCg4rWe bXueOz7WP4d550aYKlKJ68U= =6L17 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Julian Y. Koh <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Network Engineer <phone:847-467-5780> Telecommunications and Network Services Northwestern University PGP Public Key:<http://bt.ittns.northwestern.edu/julian/pgppubkey.html> ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
