Band steering is favorable when you have similar coverage areas on both 2.4 and 5 ghz. That should be a given nowadays, however, with the adoption of 11n. I recommend folks evaluate their RF designs first prior to tinkering with these types of feature sets. Tune down your 2.4 so it's similar to your 5 ghz, THEN try band-steering. Otherwise, what John outlines will occur.
=========== Ryan Holland Ohio State On Jul 7, 2011, at 7:22 PM, "John Kaftan" <jkaf...@utica.edu> wrote: > We considered a 5Ghz SSID too but declined for the same reasons that Karl > noted. Our vendor suggested band steering. We have only done minimal > testing with band steering but it seems promising. I had 30 clients > connected to a single AP in our testing with only 2.4 enabled. When I turned > up the 5 Ghz band with band steering enabled all clients that were able (50%) > went to 5 Ghz. I'd like to understand what happens when a decision needs to > be made between 5 and 2.4, i.e. when 2.4 offers a better choice due to > propagation. Would you rather connect at -90 dBm to 5 or -70 to 2.4? > > I have set the min RSSI to around 10 Mb for 5 Ghz thinking that I do not want > them connecting to 5 Ghz no matter what. That should take care of it but I > have not tested. > > John Kaftan > Infrastructure Manager > Utica College > > > > On 7/7/2011 11:16 AM, Karl Reuss wrote: >> On 7/7/2011 10:29 AM, Johnson, Neil M wrote: >>> Has anyone here considered creating a separate SSID for the 5GHz band? >>> >>> The ideas is to encourage users to exclusively use 5 GHZ over 2.4. >>> >>> We've implemented band-steering, but it was suggested this would insure >>> that users use 5GHz and not fall back to 2.4. >> >> We've had something like this in place for a long time now, >> with mixed results. >> >> Our main SSID is 'umd' which is on 2.4 and 5GHz. We also have >> a 'umd-fast' that is only on 5GHz. The idea was that people >> with 5Hgz cards would see the umd-fast SSID and would choose >> it due to the superior sounding name. If you couldn't >> tell your device to prefer 802.11a, umd-fast was an easy way >> to get it. >> >> Maybe we didn't do enough PR, but the -fast SSID seems to cause >> more questions and confusion than it's worth. With band-steering >> and OSs doing a better job of selecting bands, we will probably >> decommission the -fast SSID this summer. >> >> -Karl Reuss >> >> ********** >> 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/. > > > -- > BEGIN-ANTISPAM-VOTING-LINKS > ------------------------------------------------------ > > Teach CanIt if this mail (ID 1222678676) is spam: > Spam: https://antispam.osu.edu/b.php?i=1222678676&m=ac618bf84df2&c=s > Not spam: https://antispam.osu.edu/b.php?i=1222678676&m=ac618bf84df2&c=n > Forget vote: https://antispam.osu.edu/b.php?i=1222678676&m=ac618bf84df2&c=f > ------------------------------------------------------ > END-ANTISPAM-VOTING-LINKS > ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
