What's the best way to measure or prove signal degradation due to hotspots or outside interference in a school?

[dtopo]

Hello all...looking to pick some brains about how to deal with hotspots and interference throughout our school campus. We know our students are using hotspots , but my first question is....is the signal from these hotspots significantly interfering with our campus Aerohive infrastructure to the point of degrading it? It seems we are having more issues- slower connections, longer authentication times etc, but what I can't prove is, are the increase in hotspots and rogue SSIDs attributing to our issues. I'd love suggestions on how people deal with this situation, esp in a private school setting. Can anyone suggest a directional antenna software combo that would make it easier to locate these hotspots besides what I'm using now, which is a basic laptop with some free wifi scanners on it. I'd also be interested in a tool to measure interference and noise from sources outside the wifi bands. Again, to try to pin down what might be causing our perceived signal degradation. Look forward to your responses - thanks in advance!

[bfrappier]

What does this do to Aerohive APs that have dual radios, in that case? Do they interfere with each other?

[samantha_lynn · Accepted solution]

The traffic may be using different channels but you're still sharing the same air space so it will still cause interference.

[dtopo]

Again ,,,thanks Sam ...I'll dive into that to get familiar with what I'm looking at. Just one more question .....in reference to interference....because we are certainly seeing high retries and crc on both radios in spots. Can loud signal sourced from EITHER the same channels
adios, or DIFFERENT radioschannels negatively effect any of the other the other channels? For example, can strong signal from a 5Ghz hotspot, not necessarily on the same channel as one of our APs, impact that particular AP? Or would it only effect it if they are both on the same channel. The result of our signal problems have been failed authentications, due to high retries and crc I'm guessing, at certain times of the day.

2019-11-15 10:36:25 Local6.Error 10.2.20.76 radiusd[2508]: rlm_eap: No EAP session matching the State variable.

2019-11-15 10:36:25 Local6.Warning 10.2.20.76 radiusd[2508]: aaa: RADIUS: The RADIUS server rejected user 'markpolo' through the NAS at 10.2.20.38.

[samantha_lynn]

You can look at the spectrum analysis, that will show you signal from non-wifi devices as well (like microwaves, smart printers, IoT devices etc).

If you're using ExtremeCloud IQ, you'll want to go to Manage> Check the box next to the AP> Utilities> Spectrum Intelligence.

If you're using HiveManager Classic you'll want to go to Monitor> Check the box next to the AP> utilities> Spectrum analysis.

Unfortunately there isn't much we can do settings wise that would help with non-Aerohive signals outside of your network, other than adjusting your own AP power to see if we can reduce signal overlap a bit. Near by construction won't hurt too much so long as your signal doesn't have to move through the construction site to reach the client devices.