Power settings for AP410's

[Macknkss]

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!

[Jan_Reister]

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.

[Macknkss]

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?

[Jan_Reister]

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.

[Macknkss]

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