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,

https://gtacknowledge.extremenetworks.com/articles/Q_A/What-are-the-best-radio-settings-for-my-envir...

There looks like there is an opportunity to optimise the 2.4GHz channel plan.

It might be worth opening up a case with us here at GTAC so we can take a look into your configuration a bit further.

- Sam

[Steve_Ballantyn]

Thanks Sam, I just started going through that this morning. But I don't know that I made the best choices. I think I will open a GTAC case!

[Steve_Ballantyn]

I have a lot of overlap on this network (that was my intent) but I think maybe I am choking out the channels. I followed the advice of a GTAB KB and set my Radio 1 to channel width: "80MHz". That was a mistake from what I can tell. Putting it back down to 20MHz allowed me to get connected and pass traffic again.

I presently have all my radios set to "auto" for channel assignment, but I think it may need some intervention.

Here is a map of the area ...

And here is a sniffer screenshot. Note that in this example, I connected to the network, and walked into the next room (notice the dip on the graph). Still connected to that same AP, but with obvious drop in quality.

Note that channel overlap. Is that bad?

[Doug]

Here is another good reference to review. Sometimes the client settings on the device can be adjusted to fix this issue as well.

https://gtacknowledge.extremenetworks.com/articles/Q_A/why-do-my-wireless-clients-not-roam-properly

[Steve_Ballantyn]

I have beat my head against the wall several times on changing the roaming aggressiveness. Interestingly enough, I have had more problems with Intel dual band radios than with any other NIC. And they are usually the only one with this setting in their driver.