Well damn. I had been hoping that clients would have gotten at least a little
smarter in their roaming decisions, but clearly that was just wishful thinking.
Thanks all for the confirmation...
Frank Sweetser fs at wpi.edu | For every problem, there is a solution that
Manager of Network Operations | is simple, elegant, and wrong.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute | - HL Mencken
On 3/16/2014 1:04 AM, Jeff Kell wrote:
Have seen similar results with Dell laptop locking onto 802.11n at a distance
and ignoring "same room" a/b/g. We are trying to avoid mixed deployments, and
sounds like the same concerns extend to 11ac as well.
Jeff
On 3/15/2014 11:12 PM, Alok Vimawala wrote:
Hi Frank,
We just had an interesting incident in one of our buildings where half of
the ac radios stopped working. The building has Cisco 3602i APs with the
add-on 802.11ac Wave-1 module. So, the building turned into a mixed 802.11n
and 802.11ac deployment on the 5GHz spectrum. What we saw in that building
was that new Apple MacBook Pros with the 802.11ac capable chipsets were
preferring to associated with a bad 802.11ac signal rather than connecting
to a great (AP right above the laptop) 802.11n signal.
Clients seem to prefer protocols with highest theoretical throughput
regardless of signal strength and that behavior hasn't really changed since
the days when 802.11n was first introduced. My recommendation would be to
avoid mixed 5GHz 802.11n and 802.11ac environments.
Thanks,
Alok Vimawala
University of Michigan
On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 9:54 PM, Frank Sweetser <f...@wpi.edu
<mailto:f...@wpi.edu>> wrote:
Hello all,
we're beginning plans to upgrade our wireless infrastructure from 11n
to 11ac, and I'm hoping that someone can chime in on their experience
with mixed capability buildings.
When we first went from 11a/b/g to 11n, we found that clients in
buildings with mixed capability APs had some odd roaming issues - and by
"odd", I mean utterly braindead. A fair number of clients would
aggressively latch onto an 11n AP at -80, while ignoring an a/b/g AP in
the same room at -50, with predictably poor results. In the end, we had
to ensure that buildings were upgraded in full, rather than
incrementally, to fix the complaints.
My question is, has anyone seen similar issues in buildings with a mix
of 11ac and 11n APs?
--
Frank Sweetser fs at wpi.edu <http://wpi.edu> | For every problem,
there is a solution that
Manager of Network Operations | is simple, elegant, and wrong.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute | - HL Mencken
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