topic Re: Power settings for AP410's in ExtremeCloud IQ

Power settings for AP410's

Macknkss — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 15:16:29 GMT

Hi, we recently replaced our Cisco wireless environment with Extreme 410's (Extreme site engine and cloud IQ). We were told we'd need 15 APs per floor which is over twice as many as we had previously. Our office is mostly open with cubicles, so signal travels a long ways and our APs are 30 to 50 feet apart.

With the standard settings our performance was horrible because of interference. After working with Extreme support they tweaked the settings, lowering 2.4 signal to 2 (floor) and 10 dbm max power. 5 ghz is now to 4 - 11 dbm.

This helped but RSSI is still very high for the neighboring APs, coming in mid -50s. On one floor we manually set the power on APs to around 3 to 7 dbm and this seems to be even better performance.

Anyone else having similar issues? I'm wondering if this is abnormal. Seems like Cloud IQ should do a better job of regulating power. I know the alternative to lowering power would be to remove some APs, which we may eventually do.

Thanks!

Re: Power settings for AP410's

JonasD_Complit — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 13:27:11 GMT

Is this problem only on 2.4 or also on 5? If you have no 2.4 clients I would disable it. If not possible, I would disable 2.4 on some of the ap's to lower the interference.

Power level 2 is very low, clients need to be able to talk back.

I think it is best that you let do a validation site survey by a decent integrator.

Re: Power settings for AP410's

Macknkss — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 14:49:52 GMT

Thanks Jonas! We have 2.4 disabled on our "corp" SSID, which uses 802.1x auth, but it's still alive on our guest SSIDs. All our tests are done on corp, so yeah our problems are only on 5. Still may be worth while to shut down 2.4 and test I guess?

We already know that our environment is not ideal for many reasons but we're trying to just make it work. Some day maybe we'll have the funds to get someone who knows what they're doing in here to survey though.

Re: Power settings for AP410's

Jan_Reister — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 11:35:30 GMT

As others suggested, you should collect data with a wifi scanner (simplest) or a full wifi survey.There are 25 20 MHz channels in 5GHz, so 15 AP per floor is not a lot.

What's the configured channel width? You may have co-channel interference if 40 or 80 MH chs are used.

Re: Power settings for AP410's

Macknkss — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 22:35:46 GMT

Appreciate the help Jan. Channel width is 20. We still seem to have channel interference. We do have an ekahau, just learning to use it. Going to run another survey tomorrow but this I guess shows it's a problem. So why isn't it optimizing the channels? Should we be manually assigning them?

Re: Power settings for AP410's

Jan_Reister — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 12:50:20 GMT

Hard to say @Macknkss , depends on number of stacked floors, floor attenuation, channels used. I assume you use all the available 5 GHz channels. Check the Radio Profile and if needed create a custom Radio Profile with all the channels you need. The apply it to the AP templates in use.

Re: Power settings for AP410's

Macknkss — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 17:30:39 GMT

We're not using DFS so we only have 9 channels. Extreme support seemed against that but maybe we'll give a try and test. This is from a problem spot, in the corner of our building with a bunch of apartments nearby. The screen print is from Ekahau which we're still learning. Looks bad! Thanks Jan!

wifi0 (14):
State: RUN
Lowest cost channel: 1, lowest-cost: 18
Channel   1 Cost: 18
Channel   2 Cost: 32767 (overlap)
Channel   3 Cost: 32767 (overlap)
Channel   4 Cost: 32767 (overlap)
Channel   5 Cost: 32767 (overlap)
Channel   6 Cost: 26
Channel   7 Cost: 32767 (overlap)
Channel   8 Cost: 32767 (overlap)
Channel   9 Cost: 32767 (overlap)
Channel 10 Cost: 32767 (overlap)
Channel 11 Cost: 34

wifi1 (16):
State: RUN
Lowest cost channel: 36, lowest-cost: -1
Channel 36 Cost: -1
Channel 40 Cost: 25
Channel 44 Cost: 13
Channel 48 Cost: 31
Channel 149 Cost: -1
Channel 153 Cost: 22
Channel 157 Cost: 22
Channel 161 Cost: -1
Channel 165 Cost: 31

Re: Power settings for AP410's

Jan_Reister — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 13:27:35 GMT

You can't control neighboring APs, just coexhist with it. Do the Ekahau survey and analyze it, if you want to learn, put it in Ekahau cloud and get the optimization insights, it's a nice feature.

Re: Power settings for AP410's

Macknkss — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 22:38:42 GMT

Did exactly this and the optimizer is saying to optimize by changing the channels. I still think that cloud IQ is poorly managing the channels. thank you again for your help Jan!