10.2r4 firmware causing AP650's to lose connectivity?

[KevinP1]

Okay, I don’t know what’s happening here but this isn’t looking pretty. All of our AP650’s are losing connectivity multiple times throughout the day. 

Look at this! Some AP’s will only do this once or twice and others are doing it often, like this ? There’s nothing indicating any type of error or issue. We didn’t have this problem on firmware 10.09rb.

I have a case open with GTAC, but are we the only ones seeing this issue?

[daniel1]

We have Auto for both 2,4 and 5 Ghz on our AP650 and it’s working fine.

But you need at least HiveOS 10.0r8 for that, the versions we used before that always used full power from the policy.

[w1f1n00b]

Also I’m a bit surprised to see in more than one thread people using power 1 or 2. I’ve seen that work in my environment in some locations, but am still using auto channel/power in most locations. However, 9 times out of 10, auto power runs at whatever the max power is set to (in my case 10-14 depending on ap and location). It seems I may need to re-evaluate and possibly be more aggressive with my power settings.

Has anyone seen the Auto power option make logical choices? Should this even be considered a viable setting?

[w1f1n00b]

The settings I listed have been adjusted slowly for over a year. My current philosophy is if GTAC suggested I try turning something off for troubleshooting, I’ve left it off for the sake of simplicity. As many of these options aren’t critical I feel it’s better to err on the side of less complexity until we feel we have stable firmware, and then I can re-introducing other options.

[KevinP1]

<user-mention data-id="9899346">@javabomberman</user-mention> 

Based on the proximity of our AP’s, multiple floors, an AP in every classroom, and the majority of our walls are metal stud framed with drywall; we use 2.4GHz on radio 0 and 5 GHz on radio 1. We had to do this and not dual 5 GHz because of the “intended design” of the AP’s. Previous thread about this issue: Radio channel grouping and High Interference

• We have band steering enabled
• 2.4GHz radio 0 | Power level at 1dBm (static) operating on 20 MHz
• 5GHz radio 1 | Power level at 2dBm (static) operating on 40 MHz (98% of our AP’s)

In our situation, we were running every AP on 20 MHz (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) because that’s been professed as “best practice”. However, we determined even at the current power levels, the radios were still too chatty and clients were acting like a squirrel in the middle of the road. We left power levels exactly as they were (radio 0 @ 1 dBm | radio 1 @ 2 dBm) and changed the previous settings that I had listed above. The AP650 | AP510c are powerful AP’s and having the power levels too high will cause a significant amount of interference. We only have certain areas (gym, cafetorium, etc) with higher power levels. The spaces are larger and some of these areas have concrete walls so that allowed us to crank up the power.

Increasing the channel width between 40 and 80 MHz will make the AP’s less noisy as well. As for AX, when there are more AX devices then we’ll start to shift over; for right now we’re staying with AC.

I hope this helps ?

[Hans_SD44]

@kevin.piazza @Sam Pirok 

Kevin, Can you expand on the AP power levels in relation to the channel width change from 20MHz to 40MHz?

Also, was there any discussion of the Band Steering option from 2.4GHz to 5Ghz?

I was hoping I wouldn’t have to dig too deeply into these radio profile settings since I know basically nothing of value about the actual technical applications of them, but I guess there’s not much other option (updating to 10.3r1 doesn’t seem to have fixed the memory dump reporting, but I still don’t know if that actually means anything useful.)

I’ve been running templates at some locations with full AX (5GHz on every antenna that can handle it, 2.4GHz only on the AP630 antenna that doesn’t support 5GHz) and I’d like to tune this profile to be pushed out org-wide, but I want to make sure everything is optimal. I’m running 10 dBm on the 2.4GHz AX antenna, and 20 dBm on the 5GHz antenna.

On the AP650s, I have both antennas @ 5GHz, but one is 10 dBm @ 20MHz and the other is 20 dBm @ 40MHz.

Anyways, any feedback would be appreciated.