From: Young, Ryan [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, October 29, 2010 2:54 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] Wireless Issues
Ibukun, We are running Meru on our boarding school campus, we had a similar problem and we were able to isolate it to a few important things. Couple of questions to get a feel for what your experiencing: Approx how close are your AP's to one another? How many users are you servicing per ap are they 301's or 320's? If they are 320's have you considered upgrading to 4.0 and band steering anyone you can into 5ghz to get away from the "B" Users? How many SSID's are you broadcasting per ap? What is your Beacon time per AP? In your Gui are you seeing a high number of AP's with high management overhead or Retries? Here is why I ask all these things, when we had our dorms surveyed they surveyor over subscribed the AP's for the area so they ended up being too close to each other (30 ft direct line of site) and created interference. We channel layered them to Channel's one and eleven, I wasn't crazy about breaking up the virtualcell but it had to be done. That reduced my management overhead dramatically. Next we increased the beacon time per ESS from 100 to 200ms this increased our bandwidth availability by 50% Next we changed to WPA2 Enterprise from WPA greatly reducing AP management overhead, we also reduced the number of broadcasting SSID's depending on the geographic area of the campus, Beacon ID's can severly hamper your airspace especially since your ap's don't beacon at the same times. Finally we monitored AP's and tracked down a bunch of Intel PROSET 2200 BG cards that had very old drivers on them they have been known to completely crash a managed ap if the drivers aren't up to date. Also 802.11B can saturate your airspace if you can shut it down, call meru they will walk you through it. Please feel to reach out to me with any questions, I've been in your position and it sucks but once you get thru it things are awesome, the Meru controller and AP's give me zero issue now that we have ironed out the speed bumps. If you wouldn't mind please forward this to the forum we changed domains in our email and I have to update my account info before it will accept replies from me. Best, Ryan Young Network / Systems Administrator The Masters School Dobbs Ferry, NY 10522 914-479-6671 [email protected] ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
