We considered a 5Ghz SSID too but declined for the same reasons that
Karl noted. Our vendor suggested band steering. We have only done
minimal testing with band steering but it seems promising. I had 30
clients connected to a single AP in our testing with only 2.4 enabled.
When I turned up the 5 Ghz band with band steering enabled all clients
that were able (50%) went to 5 Ghz. I'd like to understand what happens
when a decision needs to be made between 5 and 2.4, i.e. when 2.4 offers
a better choice due to propagation. Would you rather connect at -90 dBm
to 5 or -70 to 2.4?
I have set the min RSSI to around 10 Mb for 5 Ghz thinking that I do not
want them connecting to 5 Ghz no matter what. That should take care of
it but I have not tested.
John Kaftan
Infrastructure Manager
Utica College
On 7/7/2011 11:16 AM, Karl Reuss wrote:
On 7/7/2011 10:29 AM, Johnson, Neil M wrote:
Has anyone here considered creating a separate SSID for the 5GHz band?
The ideas is to encourage users to exclusively use 5 GHZ over 2.4.
We've implemented band-steering, but it was suggested this would insure
that users use 5GHz and not fall back to 2.4.
We've had something like this in place for a long time now,
with mixed results.
Our main SSID is 'umd' which is on 2.4 and 5GHz. We also have
a 'umd-fast' that is only on 5GHz. The idea was that people
with 5Hgz cards would see the umd-fast SSID and would choose
it due to the superior sounding name. If you couldn't
tell your device to prefer 802.11a, umd-fast was an easy way
to get it.
Maybe we didn't do enough PR, but the -fast SSID seems to cause
more questions and confusion than it's worth. With band-steering
and OSs doing a better job of selecting bands, we will probably
decommission the -fast SSID this summer.
-Karl Reuss
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