Apple Device Roaming

[jeremy_west_564]

I am having a problem with frequent disconnects on apple devices when signal strength is great. In looking into this further, I noticed that the apple devices in question are roaming at an alarming rate. This is happening across iPad, iPod, and MacBook platforms. For example, I looked at an apartment with an iPod touch that was roaming every 30 seconds or so. There is a Win7 laptop in the same apartment that has not roamed one time. I have about 40 Apple devices on the network and similar behavior is happening on 70% of them. I have about 40 other devices on the network and this is not happening with any of them that I have looked at so far. What is more, the Apple devices are roaming out from a nearby AP to an AP several hundred feet away with a few buildings between them. The user is not leaving the apartment but the device is roaming to APs throughout the campus, even APs it either should not see at all, or just barely.

Any ideas? Has anyone seen anything like this before?

[greg_gilbert]

unfortunately that initial fix didn't work for more than a few days for me. after that I turned the 5GHz radio off, and that resolved the symptoms that the users were experiencing, but obviously did not "fix" the problem. what seems to have finally fixed the problem was upgrading my firmware to the latest version 9.5.2.0.15 (I believe). check with tech support for the firmware upgrade path from your version, because if you skip an intermediate upgrade you will have problems. I upgraded the firmware on 7/17/2013 and have been running the 5GHz radio without issues for about a month now.

[spikes_it]

Excellent point. Back when this started, I was current. I'll upgrade to the most recent code and keep my fingers crossed. Thanks for the comment!

[spikes_it]

9.6 is looking solid. It looks to be a problem with the 9.4 that I was hanging onto (can't remember why support didn't want me to upgrade at the time -- I think there was an issue with 5.1 they were fixing).

Thanks for the lead!

[spikes_it]

Alas - it was good for only a few days as well. While it does seem to be a bit better, we're still seeing disconnects. This is very odd as I'm not seeing the same problem at another site/company. Support sent some recommendations surrounding changing the mgmt-tx-rate settings but that didn't resolve the issue. It feels like there's something simple that's being missed here.

[keith_redfield]

You've got one of our best techs looking at it, so it will definitely be interesting to find out the root cause. Stay tuned.