Help with AP122 AP Profile for School Classroom deployment, clients using 2.4ghz devices.

[c_hardwick]

Just looking for some advice on the best settings for our AP Profiles, we are using AP122's deployed one per classroom and important room totalling around 29 Ap's. Clients are mostly Android tablets that roam between classroom's throughout the day and teacher laptops, most are fairly older devices utilising 2.4ghz rather than 5. The reason I ask is that we had around 30 android devices inside a classroom today and around 5-7 could not authenticate with DHCpP to get a IP address, I checked DHCP on the schools DC server and we had 300 left to distribute, My thinking was the AP couldn't handle any more but I remember the sales rep saying that 30 would not be a problem for the Ap's, so this just leaves the settings right?

[samantha_lynn]

The APs can host 100 or more clients (depending on the APs chip set) per radio, so 30 certainly wouldn't be an issue. I'd recommend running a client monitor so we can see exactly which step in the authentication process is failing.

As for suggestions for AP settings, with one to one deployments one of the biggest concerns is overlapping signals, which will cause packet damage, and result in slow wifi speeds. To mitigate this, you'll want to turn the power down on the APs pretty low. Typically with one to one deployments it's not unusual to go as low as 1-2dBm. I usually recommend turning the power down by 2dBm, then letting the AP run as normal for about an hour, then test again. This is to avoid causing sudden dead zones, and will help find the balance between client connectivity and overlapping signals.

You can check to see if you are overlapping signals by SSHing in to an AP and running "show acsp neighbor". Look at the RSSI column, any values in the -50's up through to 0 indicate an overlapping signal near by. Anything -70 down to -100 is a good neighboring signal that won't collide.