General question about throughput on different wireless access points.

[Eric_Ashton]

We have 121 extreme APs and our biggest complaint is poor wireless speeds. We use Extreme AP3825i aps for the most part. I have noticed that one of our APs is producing far less throughput than an AP with the same settings much further away. 80 mbps vs 5mbps at 20/40mhz channel width. This is just an example we normally run our APs at 20 mhz on the 5ghz. I wonder if this is a sign that the AP has gone bad? If so is there anyway to tell if other APs have gone bad without connecting to each one and running an iperf? I have shutdown the AP and rebooted it. It has the latest firmware. Another note we have set channels based off a site survey and I am using the Ekahau site survey software.

With a high number of wireless APs in the building should I turn on auto power so that I cant see more than a few APs at a time? Will turning the power down reduce throughput speeds? Would you run your 5 ghz at 20/40/80 mhz? The max number of clients on one ap is in the 20's we total right around 550 guests on our network. How would you start to tackle this problem?

[Gareth_Mitchell]

These are all complex technologies, in brief:

STBC = Space Time Block Encoding - Used to spread copies of a single data stream across multiple (2 or more) antennas to improve the reliability of data transfer.
LDPC = Low Density Parity Check - is a forward error correction encoding scheme, the idea being to correct single bit errors and improve SNR.
TxBF = Transmit beamforming Allows the antenna to adjust the phase and amplitude in such away that MIMO is utilised and allows a signal to arrive at a receiver in phase, therefore using multipath in a constructive way - the net result being higher SNR at the receiver and increased throughput.

-Gareth

[Laura]

What do these acronyms stand for?
enable STBC for all radios on all APs
-- enable LDPC for all radios on all APs
-- disable TXBF for all radios on all APs

[Hawkins__Bruce]

Good luck! I should also have mentioned, that if you are using WPAv2/AES with PSK, and you have the options to enable Opportunistic Key Caching (OKC) and Pre-Authentication ... you should enable both as additional measures to promote the smoothest roaming possible between neighboring APs.

If you have any issues using Multi-Edit to push out those changes to all your APs or challenges finding some of those settings, or just need assistance from us in general while working through this ... never hesitate to open a case with us. That's why we're here!

[Eric_Ashton]

Thank you for your response I will try this.