Does band steering work for open wlans?

[salvatore_busce]

We have sites with 70% apple devices but see very little on the 5GHz radios. Does band steering work for open wlans?

[jason_vore]

I know that I'm a couple months late getting in on this discussion, but I have the same question as Salvatore.

Should we leave the 2.4 WLANs at the default of 20 and only lower the 5 GHz WLANs to 1? Or should we lower the RSSI for all WLANs to 1?

Thanks!

[keith_redfield]

Ideally, just leave things at the defaults unless you are seeing the problem that Salvatore saw.

If you do change the RSSI threshold - set them on both radios.

https://support.ruckuswireless.com/an... talks about this and some other options.

Our own testing shows IOS devices are extremely aggressive about connecting to 2.4 for reasons only Apple can explain.

[jason_vore]

I'm seeing similar problems with Android tablets on our network. They are being very aggressive with connecting to 2.4 GHz as well.

One more question. If I wanted to increase the withholding-limit, would I also do that identically on both radios? Or, would I only increase the withholding-limit on the 2.4 radios?

Thanks!

[keith_redfield]

I think technically you could just do it on the 2.4 (the 2.4 radio is actually doing all the deciding - whether to send de-auths, withold probes, etc), but we're recommending setting both radios identically.

Toggling airplane mode might help the clients that tend to stick to 2.4, and also have them forget the 2.4 wlans (if you have any with distinct SSID)

[bill_burns_6069]

Sal:
Are your issues resolved?

"band-steering" can cause clients to roam to other 2.4Ghz radios instead of the local 5Ghz radio.

If you've got a high density of APs, this may account for the majority of clients being on 2.4Ghz instead of 5Ghz.

If that's what's going on, making changes like ofdm-only and bss-minrate may help.