Suggested settings for dual R600 network in congested building

[scott_swanson_7]

We have 2 Unleashed R600s in our office setup with the following details:

• Mounted on either end of the office, approx. 75ft apart
• Just above a drop ceiling so they're out of sight
• Hardwired to our main switch using PoE (Cisco managed)
• Office is on the 5th floor with 1 other tenant
• Building is in a very congested wireless area (~45 - 50 other networks discoverable, 20 - 25 that have strong signals.
• They're not using their own DHCP server, our main firewall handles that (SonicWall)
• Setup to use an external DNS server (Google's at the moment)
• 15-25 people in the office on a daily basis, mostly all using MacBook Airs or MacBook Pros

Most of our users aren't having any problems with internet speed, but we have 3-5 people on a regular basis that have very big speed issues and have to walk out of their office to get a connection or just constantly slows down.

We haven't changed any of the default settings on the APs and hoping anyone had any suggestions on how to optimize them for the congested area we're in. 

Thanks!

[daniel_m]

With Unleashed, your only real option is to turn down the load balancing percentage.

[seanmuir]

Questions:

1. What's your signal level in your office - have you conducted a basic passive survey?
2. Is Wi-Fi only used for Internet or is it used for Intranet also?
3. What applications are running in your office?
4. What's your backhaul speed in your office?
5. What's the channel size on your AP's?
6. Have you done any spectrum analysis to determine Airime utilisation and channel usage?
7. You say 20-25 with strong signal - what are the peak values and what Band are they on i.e. 2.4GHz only or 2.4 and 5GHz?
8. Are you using an OFDM only channel on your 2.4GHz radios?
9. Do you have any known legacy clients in your network?

[bill_burns_6069]

Scott:

I would suggest having an additional SSID that's only present on your 5Ghz radios.
In my institution, I name that SSID "Fast".
That way, clients have the option of connecting to the 5Ggig SSID and knowing that they're not roaming onto a 2.4Ghz radio.

Also (in an environment with only 2 APs) it may be helpful create a separate SSID for each radio of each AP. That way (if an individual client is having speed issues) it will be possible to force the client to a particular AP/radio to prevent roaming and test performance on that one radio.

I'm able to do this w/ my controller.
I don't use "unleased".
Hopefully I'm not recommending you do do something that's not possible.

[john_d]

You can't do that with Unleashed currently. Though I think you can turn off 2.4GHz altogether.

[seanmuir]

There are no WLAN or AP groups on unleashed so you cant turn off the 2.4GHz radio - unsure about global radio configs though:

http://docs.ruckuswireless.com/unleashed/200.1.9.12/#c-RadioBGN.html

You can however use the percentage value on Band Balacing to push all capable client to the 5GHz radio:

http://docs.ruckuswireless.com/unleashed/200.1.9.12/#c-BandBalancing.html

Just set the value to 0%