Jouni, Thanks for the reply. Please see my comments in line below:
On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 9:41 AM, Jouni Malinen <[email protected]>wrote: > On Sat, 2010-03-20 at 14:19 -0700, Curtis Larsen wrote: > > At my work the singleSSID supports 802.11n in the 2.4ghz and 5ghz > > bands. Even though 2.4 ghz is slower - my laptop chooses 2.4 every > > time. Is there a way to force connection to 5ghz or disable 2.4ghz? > > I don't think there is currently any configuration option for doing that > in the driver or an easy mechanism for doing that. If you are running > wpa_supplicant manually, you could configure a network block with only > some of the channels marked for scanning (scan_freq parameter). That may > end up doing this kind of selection in practice. > > Yes, I do run wpa_supplicant. I would love to see a sample config for this -even though it sounds like it would not work in all areas across the campus. Still, better than what I have right now. > However, I do not think that forcing 5 GHz connection is really that > useful in most cases; giving an option to prefer 5 GHz band may, > however, be useful (or some other additional mechanism for preferring > some APs over others). I would assume you would still like to connect > even if some location can only see the 2.4 GHz BSS. > Well, the thing is ...I know that in this environment 5ghz will always provide a better experience, so why even waste resources scanning 2.4, calculating preferences, etc.? Since all AP's run 2.4 and 5ghz on the same SSID, preferring certain AP's would not help. 5ghz is available everywhere so I never want to even see a 2.4GHz BSS. > > I would prefer to make this type of optimizations automatic whenever > possible, i.e., there really should not be need for the end user to have > to have this type of knowledge. Do you happen to know why the 5 GHz band > is better in your particular case? Is it just because the APs on 2.4 GHz > get more users? > Automatic is good unless it is based on flawed assumptions. For example, just because the signal strength might be greater on the 2.4ghz band does not mean that the overall client experience will be better. In fact, in general I see slightly lower signal strength on 5ghz but still get double the throughput there. Any automatic trigger would have to be based on signal and channel width and noise/congestion I think. Having the ability to do this does not mean the user has to have the knowledge to do so. There are automated tools like this: http://www.cloudpath.net/ that allow administrators to configure this for users on a per SSID basis. The 5ghz band is better in this case because it uses 40MHz wide channels while 2.4ghz only uses 20 Mhz wide channels. Also, there is always more contention in the 2.4ghz band simply because more cards use it while the 5ghz band is always cleaner because of the additional channels and fewer clients in high density areas like conferences and auditoriums. I don't understand why many cards allow this in windows, but we don't see the ability in Linux yet. ...Seems very odd to me. Thanks, Curtis
_______________________________________________ ath9k-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ath9k.org/mailman/listinfo/ath9k-devel
