We have experienced a similar issue. I had 1131's in several buildings and coverage was decent. At the time that was acceptable because wireless was treated as an convenience. Now perceptions have changed to wireless is mandatory; so in light of that we upgraded several buildings to the 3500s and even increased the number of AP,s in some buildings. As kids have returned we have seen a very large number of complaints coming from areas we thought we had the jump on. These are also areas that were not perfect with the 1131's (or we would not have upgraded) but they were not as high a volume of complaints as before. I opened a TAC with Cisco and we discovered that the AP's were at only a 7 power setting with RRM and when we moved to manual on the periphery AP's the coverage really improved. It makes me wonder if RRM is experiencing issues though because there was one AP in new construction area that could see other APs far away and I expected the power to be a 1 or 2 but it was at 7.
Also, I have always hated to open a TAC because I was sure I would get someone that did not "COMPREHEND ENGLISH - (I hate it when companies claim their oversees guys can speak English, sure they can speak it but can they comprehend it)." This time though I have to brag on CISCO and on TAC support Bob Tracy. It was one of the best Tech support experiences I have had in a long time. From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Christina Klam Sent: Friday, September 02, 2011 8:53 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Signal variability after upgrade to 7.0.116 Upgrade Path: We upgraded from 4.X to 7.0.116. TX power: As you all mentioned, I went from having 98% of all APs running at power level 1 before the upgrade to just 55.5% of our b/g and 90% of our a after the upgrade. (We are running a mix of b/g, n, and a.) I also looked at the APs in the areas of the reported connectivity and performance issues and they are all using 1131s with TX power of 1. But, I did notice that the channels changing over the course of a week. This is an anomaly in our environment. As planned this summer, I will continue to rollout new APs in these areas. As a tangent, I was hoping to contain a b-only clients in a separate SSID or VLAN. How do others deal with B clients? I did a report and found that we have at least five b-connections a week. In our environment, that is small but not statistically insignificant. Thank you everyone. Christina Klam Network Administrator Institute for Advanced Study Email: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Einstein Drive Telephone: 609-734-8154 Princeton, NJ 08540 Fax: 609-951-4418 ********** 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/.
