topic Re: High level of RF Pollution in Access Points - Indoor and Outdoor

High level of RF Pollution

kong_foo_wo — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 07:20:56 GMT

One of my ZF7372 has high RF Pollution and users always has bad connections. I would like to find out will high RF Pollution affect wifi performance directly? Does re-locate AP helps or any fix?
Screenshot below which value shows the AP has bad performance that I need to aware/fix?

Re: High level of RF Pollution

jay_files — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 09:13:33 GMT

Hi,

This may not work, it's just a guess, but my first thought when you mentioned high RF pollution was, why not change channels? Then I looked at your screenshot and I see you've disabled Background Scanning and allowed only channels 1,6,11.

ZoneDirector and Ruckus APs use Background Scanning to try to find a better channel, constantly. If Channel 1 is polluted, they will try to find a better channel. You may have forced the AP to use a bad channel and disabled the feature that allows it to try to find a better one.

My suggestion is allow all the channels on both bands, enable Background Scanning, and see if it will find a better channel by itself.

You also have 6 WLANs deployed on this AP. That's a lot. If there's any way to reduce the number of WLANs deployed on that AP, maybe try to reduce them. We say 8 WLANs is the recommended max otherwise performance will suffer. 6 WLANs is getting pretty close... you can use WLAN groups to put some WLANs on some APs and others on other APs so there's not so many WLANs on channel 1.

Again this is just a guess so please don't get mad at me if it doesn't work. I'm not actually a support guy I just comment here sometimes to try to help. 🙂

But it should be easier to try this and see if it helps, rather than physically moving the AP around.

Cheers,
Jay

Re: High level of RF Pollution

Anusha_Vemula — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 09:57:08 GMT

Hello,

Along with the channels, I would suggest to reduce/increase the tx power based on the coverage overlap between the adjacent APs.

I think a site survey would be recommended here.

Regards,
Anusha

Re: High level of RF Pollution

kong_foo_wo — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 10:20:35 GMT

Hi Jay, yes we do have multiple WLAN in our environment. After a few checking I noticed that there are 2 WLANs have background scanning set to off. As suggested, background scanning is on all AP now, will see if this really help.
Will consider decrease the number of WLAN too.
Thanks for your input.

Re: High level of RF Pollution

kong_foo_wo — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 10:24:30 GMT

Site survey was done before deploying APs, but our users encountered bad performance on certain location recently.

Re: High level of RF Pollution

michael_brado — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 23:08:55 GMT

Perhaps new equipment installed near that location. Would be good to enable background scanning, run ChannelFly for a while, then turn it off and keep last channels...?