Clients connecting to AP's that are too far away

[Steve_Ballantyn]

What would cause my wireless clients to overlook AP's that are close by (directly overhead) and maintain a connection to AP's that are several rooms or several floors away? I have had many issues with poor quality connections only to find that the user is nowhere near the AP they are connected to.

If I disassociate them, they will sometimes reconnect to a closer AP. But usually the reconnect to the same one. For some reason, rebooting the AP's one at a time seems to clear this up. But it continues to happen.

It also seems to happen in a pattern. We will get two to five users at once experiencing the issue.

Is this because I have the signal power set too high (I have them all set to full blast)? Or is there something else that needs tweaked?

[Sam]

Hi Steve,

You might find this article useful: https://gtacknowledge.extremenetworks.com/articles/Solution/Issues-with-clients-staying-with-an-Acce....

Does the issue occur mostly in 2.4GHz or 5GHz?

- Sam

[Steve_Ballantyn]

Hello Sam, thanks for the link. It doesn't seem to be specific to one radio. In the past I tried forcing clients to use b/g as I assumed it was the new n/a/ac that was the issue. But that didn't make any difference. I am reluctant to make this change during production hours because I don't want to go dumping everyone off.

I did make this setting change on the one AP that I was connected to which was far away from me. It did force me to disconnect and I reconnected to the AP overhead. Hey, that worked!! However - I connected at two bars (out of five) and I was dropping packets left and right. I had 150mbps of bandwidth ... but it was useless.

Then I noticed I have some channel issues ... see my reply further down in a moment. I will put in some pictures.