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 · Accepted solution]

You can't control neighboring APs, just coexhist with it. Do the Ekahau survey and analyze it, if you want to learn, put it in Ekahau cloud and get the optimization insights, it's a nice feature.

[Macknkss]

Did exactly this and the optimizer is saying to optimize by changing the channels. I still think that cloud IQ is poorly managing the channels. thank you again for your help Jan!

[JonasD]

Is this problem only on 2.4 or also on 5? If you have no 2.4 clients I would disable it. If not possible, I would disable 2.4 on some of the ap's to lower the interference.

Power level 2 is very low, clients need to be able to talk back.

I think it is best that you let do a validation site survey by a decent integrator.

[Macknkss]

Thanks Jonas! We have 2.4 disabled on our "corp" SSID, which uses 802.1x auth, but it's still alive on our guest SSIDs. All our tests are done on corp, so yeah our problems are only on 5. Still may be worth while to shut down 2.4 and test I guess?

We already know that our environment is not ideal for many reasons but we're trying to just make it work. Some day maybe we'll have the funds to get someone who knows what they're doing in here to survey though.