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Roaming issues

Roaming issues

Laura
New Contributor III
C5210 controllers with 9.21.10.5 and 3605/3610 APs. Does anyone else in a school district setting have roaming issues and ways to improve it? We have principals that use iObservation tool on their Macbooks and roam to different classrooms. They say they can connect, get kicked off, can't get back on, get dropped...Is there such a thing as seamless roaming? I tell them to reboot machine and turn wifi on/off.
14 REPLIES 14

Bharathiraja__S
Extreme Employee
Hi Laura,

Please find the below KB for general details about roaming issue and what needs to be checked.

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

Check this issue step by step , how many clients are affected and how long ?

If you change anything from AP properties and save the settings it might affect live network users .

So trace the issue where it is and confirm first before changing anything on EWC network.

Thanks,
Suresh.B

JP4
New Contributor II
I would do some channel analysis like Rich suggested if you have not already to see how many AP's you can see/hear from a given classroom. You have your channel selection to Auto which is probably going to lead to having multiple AP's on the same channel, at least from my experience (depending on how dense your deployment is ).

Apple devices are usually good at using 5ghz if they are somewhat current. You can look at increasing the Min. Basic Rate, especially on radio 1. Unless you have a really sparse AP deployment, you want higher than 6 Mbps from my experience for radio 1. This *can* help with roaming.

If you have floor plans, go through your AP's, mark them on the floor plans,note the channel each is running on and the last six of one of the BSSID's for each AP. Without even doing any onsite testing, if you look at the floor plan and have AP's next to each other on the same channel, you are going to have all kinds of issues like you are describing. You can use the plans as a guide to setting the channels manually which is pretty easy to do using 20mhz wide channels on radio 1 once you get an idea of signal penetration. Not sure of the size of buildings you are dealing with, so maybe this isn't practical, but I have done this and refer to them regularly. Another option would be putting the maps into oneview (if you have that) to get a look at the channel layout.

As suggested though, you need something to give you a look at what your dealing with. Other suggestions include AirPort Utility, Wifi Explorer or inssider. All depends on what kind of device you have.

Rich_Upshaw
New Contributor II
Macs I have seen are notorious for "sticking" to an access point. This is more of a client issue and you may need to go to each client and adjust the roaming aggressiveness.
However, how high are your radios turned up? Are you trying to cover as much area as possible with your Access points? It may be as simple as lowering your power. Also, try and force the clients to use 5Ghz and turn your 2.4 way down. This will compartmentalize your signal a bit better.

Without knowing what your floorplan looks like, I'm just going to take a stab at a recommendation:
Turn off 2.4 in all the classrooms and turn off 5Ghz in the hallways. Let the AP's in the hallways take care of the Overlay (2.4) and try to make each classroom a compartment with a different 5Ghz channel. Not sure if you have an iPhone or an Android, but I use WiFi analyzer on Android to get a quick reading of what my spectrum looks like in a given location. If you can get a strong signal strength from the AP in the next classroom over, turn the radio down. This will make a more natural roaming environment.

Laura
New Contributor III

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Maybe I should remove the hallway APs and put them in the classrooms.
GTM-P2G8KFN