clients not connecting to nearest AP

[marty_5769526]

I have clients that connect two to three AP's away for some reason when they have an AP in their room and one in the next room. Even when there are not more then ten people on that AP it does it making their signal strength like 50 percent. Am i doing something wrong or?

[dilojunior]

He have issues like that here at the university too, and also got the "it's the *client* that's responsible for roaming decisions".

For instance, I was doing a test at the Library on a private room and my laptop (MB pro) connected to an AP that was behind of another building something like:

My Laptop Library 2nd floor -> 20meters (distance between the buildings) -> another building (2 floors, have others APs) -> 10 meters -> 4th floor AP that my laptop connected. And I was like 5 meters from one of the library's AP. Checked the library AP currently connected users at the time and it had around 40 clients. The AP i was connected had around 20 clients.

It caused some low connections when I was accessing the internet.

We have around 200 zf7962 & zf7363 and now with 9.7 fw version.

We also set, a while ago, with help of Ruckus to avoid clients to connect with 802.11b a.k.a really old wireless cards, we decided to "expand" our area with non wifi signal to guarantee a good quality signal to most of our clients 802.11g/n. But I don't know if this feature stills apply after a lot of FW upgrades. I remember that helps a little with client roaming.

[primoz_marinsek]

You can check if OFDM only is enabled and what the BSS min rate is if you log into ZDs SSH and running the following

# enable
# show wlan all

You will get a list of all your WLANs. Then look for "OFDM-Only State = Enabled" and "BSS Minrate = X Mbps"

Do you have client load balancing enabled?

IT would be nice to see how much your APs "hear" each other. There is a way of seeing this by going to the Monitor :: APs and clicking on an APs MAC address which takes you to the APs details page. There you will find "Neighbor APs" table which lists all the other APs this particular AP can "hear". There you will also see the "Signal" indicator.

Now this isn't by any means the best way of getting proper data to solve your issue, but if you see many audible APs with power greater than 15% you are probably having issues due to too much overlap.

I suspect your APs are really close to each other so raising BSS min rate would probably help a bit. You can try raising it to 24Mbps but probably not more, since you can create other problems that way.

[marty_5769526]

I just turned off client load balancing to see if that would effect it any differently. I have all the latest AP's(7982's) We are a 1:1 school so each student has thier own laptop, around 460ish plus another 100 faculty/admin devices. The student laptops are all single band cards, some of the faculty i put some intel dual band cards but not many.
So if roaming is client based, should i have client roaming up to its highest or lowest?