Poll: Same or different SSID on 2.4 and 5?

[jay_dogg]

What are most people doing?

I used the same SSID for years until all the roaming/disconnect issues started happening, specifically with Mac's. For about the last year I went back to separate SSID's and things are much more stable.

What have you guys found to work the best?

[primoz_marinsek]

Well if you have use 1 SSID at least you have the chance of Load-balancing doing it's job, but if you use 2 different SSIDs you won't know to which users will prefer to connect I guess.

What kind of disconnect issues are you having exactly?

There have been various posts describing best practices for AP configuration to help with roaming.

[jay_dogg]

When using the same SSID on 2.4 and 5hgz radios, I've had many Mac's drop their connection and constantly scan for wifi. The fix usually is to turn wifi off and then back on again on the Mac and signal comes back. This has been on many different sites that I install. iPads, iPhones, PC's and other devices all seem to be unaffected, just Mac's. Apple had an issue early on when they released their AC card but this issue has popped up here and there for quite a while. Once I switched to separate SSID's, the problems stopped. I'm just assuming Mac's have low quality radios.

This isn't specific to Ruckus, I've had the same results with other brand WAP's as well.

[primoz_marinsek]

Then maybe have one SSID for every device except MACs on both bands the same and make 2 additional SSIDs for MACs only but separate them for each band or if WLAN design allows it put it on 5G only.

You can even set a device policy to forbid MACs to connect to the SSID not ment for them, or just not give the password to AMC users for that SSID.

[jay_dogg]

Thanks for the advice.

I'm aware that there are many workarounds to make things work reliability, this was more of a general question on what most people have found to work the best for them, from small 1-2 WAP jobs up to many hundreds.