Out of curiosity what power level do you run your 5ghz band? From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Hinson, Matthew P Sent: Monday, May 4, 2015 8:02 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Running APs at full power: client transmit power levels low?
Hi Tristan, You definitely want to match the Tx power between clients and APs as close as you can. Obviously, being education, we have little to no control over the hardware brought into our environment, so always knowing every device’s Tx power can be hard. Wi-Fi is a two way street. If at all possible, a client and an access point’s power settings should match. Almost every frame sent to a client must be acknowledged very soon after, and if the client can’t reliably talk back to the AP, you’re going to have an unstable or unreliable connection. We run our APs around 15-17dBm in the 2.4GHz band depending on the area but never higher. With the proliferation of mobile devices, that’s about all you can get away with without causing a mismatch. Aerohive had a blog post a while back about the iPhone 5 and its 16dBm output power in the 2.4GHz band. http://blogs.aerohive.com/blog/the-network-revolution/apple-iphone-5-wi-fi-specs From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tristan Gulyas Sent: Monday, May 4, 2015 3:55 AM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] Running APs at full power: client transmit power levels low? Hi all, We’ve run into an issue in some of our sparsely covered areas (2.4GHz coverage optimised, not density optimised) where we have APs in a corridor style deployment. This is typically found in older buildings which means we’re dealing with solid brick interior walls. These APs are typically running at maximum power levels (typically 3600/3700 series Cisco radios). In one case, we measured the client end (MacBook Pro) as -71dBm with an SNR of 22; the AP end saw the client with an SNR of 14 and a signal of -81dBm and connectivity was unreliable. I have seen similar results elsewhere with a similar deployment model. Has anyone else experienced similar issues with corridor style deployments at full power? Cheers, Tristan Tristan Gulyas Senior Network Engineer Network Operations eSolutions | Monash University 738 Blackburn Road Clayton 3800 www.monash.edu<http://www.monash.edu/> | [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
