WiFi slow when students roam

[jnesci]

I have a school with 166 AP's/2200 students. 1 AP per room. Using only 5Ghz, 2.4 shut down. 20Mhz channels. 2 ssid's, one for school devices, one is BYOD & guest. When the bell rings and students change class the entire wireless network comes to a standstill and throughput is reduced from 150Mbps to 1-2Mbps. Network stays this way for the first 10-15 minutes of each class. The wired network is unaffected and runs fine. If anyone has seen this problem and knows a solution, I would like to hear how you resolved it.

[Jan_Reister]

Fascinating issue, the solution could lay in the answers to Christoph's questions.

[Christoph_S]

Hello @jnesci,

Too many variables may be affecting wireless communications to list, for starters:

1 - Type of wireless devices: Chromebook, Windows , IOS, etc.... (There are many Chromebook articles that you can reference)

2 - Are you using the default radio profile?

3 - Are DFS channels enabled?

4 - Are the radios transmitting at full power?

5 - Are SSID data rate thresholds configured?

6 - Are broadcast and directed probe settings configured?

7 - Is cast traffic affecting the APs?

etc. 

I would recommend that you reach out to the GTAC team so that we may thoroughly investigate this issue. 

BR,

[jnesci]

I have had a GTAC case open for 2 months, two different engineers have looked at this and there has been no improvement. As of yesterday the latest change was to remove a QOS setting on a Guest User profile in case it is "leaking" through to the other user profiles. Evidently this has been seen before. Each variable you listed has been checked without change (except #5 which we are doing now). I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this issue and what the resolution was.