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!

[dtopo]

All helpful Sam!....thank you! I was wondering about the outside interference too- that which is not in a "wifi band". We have a new building (school) going up mere feet away (30-40 ft) from the problem area in question- with 3 floors of metal and steel all around, and heavy machinerywelding going on. Have you ever experienced issues in an environment with close proximity to construction going on ?

[samantha_lynn]

We have some guides that can help you mitigate interference in general, depending on which HiveManager platform you are using:

ExtremeCloud IQ (formerly HiveManager NG): https://thehivecommunity.aerohive.com/s/article/Radio-Frequency-Interference-NG

HiveManager Classic: https://thehivecommunity.aerohive.com/s/article/Radio-Frequency-Interference-Troubleshooting

This guide will walk you through how to determine which HiveManager you are using, for reference: https://thehivecommunity.aerohive.com/s/article/Which-HiveManager-Platform-am-I-using

The first command the guide discusses in "show acsp neighbor". This will show you neighboring signals and you can determine if they are too loud. The guide goes in to more detail on how to read this output but in general if you see a signal that has a RSSI signal of -59-0, that device is causing interference on your network. We want to see the RSSI value between -75 and -100 ideally, anying in the -50s and up is an issue.

That output also gives you the BSSID of the signal, which will match the MAC address of the device creating that signal until the last two characters (the last two characters are different from the devices MAC address to indicate different interfaces on the same device). You could use your wireless scanner to find the device that matches the BSSID and then either disable the signal or lower the broadcast power on that device so there isn't so much signal overlap.