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?

[keith_redfield]

It shouldn't make any difference in relation to the encryption setting. What might be making a difference is

a) Older Apple devices that don't support 5Ghz
b) 2.4Ghz has better signal propagation. If you are not deployed for "saturation" in the 5Ghz range, devices might see 2.4 more often (including outdoors, etc where you might not intend/expect coverage..)
c) You have mesh enabled (this might be the culprit...)

-K

[salvatore_busce]

I'm sure there are some older apple devices, but these sites are 70% apple, and we only see maybe 25% connected to 5GHz. APs are quite dense, and avg. signal according to the zonedirector is >60%
Looking at one AP, I'll see 10 client devices, 9 of them are ipads and iphones, and maybe on will be connected at 5GHz. All are reporting good signal strength.

I know I asked about mesh in another thread, but these two are unrelated. We do have many sites with similar ruckus deployments. Oddly enough, I saw no increase in the percentage of clients on 5GHz at the site where I removed the mesh settings.

I just dont see any evidence that band steering is working at all. How can we adjust the rssi thresholds to make it more aggressive?

[keith_redfield]

Try this from the ZD CLI:

remote_ap_cli -A get band-steering

If you disabled mesh by factory reset, then it should be enabled. If you disabled mesh via any other method, it's still "on" and band-steering on the APs will be disabled.

[salvatore_busce]

Mesh was disabled by a factory reset. Do the outputs below mean band steering is off?
ruckus# show mesh info
Mesh Settings:
Mesh Status= Disabled
---- Command 'rkscli -c "get band-steering "' executed at 54:3d:37:14:5a:a0
Band Steering:
Under Mesh AP : Off
OK
---- Command 'rkscli -c "get band-steering "' executed at 8c:0c:90:17:da:d0
Band Steering:
Under Mesh AP : Off
OK
---- Command 'rkscli -c "get band-steering "' executed at 8c:0c:90:14:e1:20
Band Steering:
Under Mesh AP : Off