Problem with MAC's moving around in School

[jan_boje]

We have about 4000 student using a Macbook Pro, Macbook Air. About 10% of those have problem when they change classroom. the Mac's is still connecting to the classroom they come from.

We have set "radio and rates" on 5.0 GHz to basic 24Mbps and up.

Our solution is to disable wireless og the client and on again.

Can we do anything to impove this in our configuration, radio profiles or ??

Our accesspoint is AP250 and AP370 with Hivemanager Classic.

Jan Boje

[AnonymousM]

Jan,

See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206207 for specifications on how Mac OSX devices roam. Ideally, your WLAN should be configured/tuned to meet these specs to improve this. 

As Sam said, if your output power is high and the devices are not meeting the threshold required for them to start probing out to find a new AP to roam to, they could stick to their currently associated AP. And with a 24 Mbps data rate configured, there could be client related issues as they may not be able to maintain a link @ 24 Mbps (FWIW, Apple recommends not going above 12 Mbps as the minimum data rate). It's a Cisco doc, but still provides some relevance - https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/wireless/controller/technotes/8-6/Enterprise_Best_Practices_for_iOS_devices_and_Mac_computers_on_Cisco_Wireless_LAN.pdf

[jan_boje]

​hej Sam

I will change this in the radio Profile "Max Transmit Power (10-20 dBm)" from 20dBm to 18 dBm. School is closing now, anything else we should try ?

otherwise I will be back  around this time Wednesday.

[samantha_lynn]

Thank you for that data. I see we are using the max power setting on the 5GHz radio, could we try lowering that to see if that helps the clients roam when needed? The max power level is 20, the lowest is 1. I usually also recommend adjusting this by 2dBm per test, so we don't cause drastic shifts in the signal coverage area all at once.

[samantha_lynn]

What is the broadcast power in use? We could actually answer a lot of questions at once if you can send me tech data from an AP with a client still connected when it should be connected to a physically closer AP. If we can't get that, tech data from any AP will still let me see what we're working with now. If you'd like to email that directly to me, my email is communityhelp@aerohive.com.

To get tech data you'll want to go to Monitor> Select the check box next to the AP> Utilities> Get Tech Data.

[jan_boje]

I Think I will try to go down to 23 dB, we do have some client where connecting time is to high.

Nothing else to try ?