Controllerless Networks

I aplogise in advance if this is not the right place to post this question and I understand in depth answers may not be available, but I wanted to get some general opinions/advice on my situation. 

I just started at a company that is trouble shooting connection drops, not connecting and slow / unstable speeds, etc at a hotel. (Problems happening at random times, random APs, floors,etc) The hotel is 10 floors (125 rooms) with 2 Aruba IAP 103s (i think 6.4.0.2-4.1)

 on each floor (2F-10F) and 1 AP in the lobby, so 19 total APs.  There are 10 networks (1 per floor) and also 10 zones (1 per floor).  The APs are unfortunetly in the hallways 1 AP on each end of hallway and basically they are stacked.  

The VC is communicating with all the other APs,  about a month or two ago becuase of the problems such as dropped connections, no connection, slow speed, etc they disabled the 5GHz band on all APs and are just using 2GHz, they claim things got a better but of course there are still problems.  They had the min TX power at 18 and the Max at Max, filter broadcast set to ARP., band steering set to disable (doesnt matter anyway since they not using 5GHz).       Well, I recommended to set Tx pwer min/max to 12 and 18 repectivily and turn back on the 5ghz band and band steering.  However they instead disabled the ARM and manually set each AP to either channel 1,6,or 11 and set the power to 21.  Does this seem like a wise thing to do? any thoughts?

It is hard to guess what is wrong with your limited information.  I would open a case with TAC in parallel.

One way to know what is going on, is to look at the utilization in the access point list to determine how saturated the medium is.  It is never a good idea to turn off the 5ghz because you are decreasing capacity.  Also, you should find out if they can upgrade to the latest 6.4.2.x so that they can control the power of the 2.4ghz and the 5ghz bands independently.  You would want the 2.4ghz band in a lower range than the 5ghz band so that the client prefers the 5ghz.

Again, this is just general information not knowing how things are setup with zones, etc.  You could have a sub optimal coverage pattern...

So, there are 2 APs for floor, each for 10 rooms?  Has anyone done an informal survey to determine what coverage they are getting in all of the rooms?  If there are only 2 APs per floor and each floor has a different SSID, that means that users cannot connect to APs below or above them for additional coverage, because the SSID is different..   Typically putting APs in the hallway yields poor coverage in rooms.  I am not sure if that is the issue in your current deployment.  Is there a reason why SSIDs are different for each floor?

There are about 13 rooms per floor and each floor has two APs.  Each AP is on oppsites sides of the hallway.  I dont know why they made 10 different SSIDs, but each SSID has identical settings.  The only difference is each SSID has a differnt zone.  From what im told they did not do any kind of survey and they rushed the installation/deployment.  

Is there any kind of helpful info I could post to help.  I am very much a newbie so please forgive me.  I did also notice a  pretty pretty long list of interering foreign APs and foreign clients under the IDS tab, all on 2.4Ghz.   I think i saw utilization for a few APs at 11% with no clients or 1 client.  not sure if that helps.  thank you again.

The first thing that should be done is a survey at least on one floor using some handheld device (an android device with Aruba Utilities would be fine:  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.arubanetworks.arubautilities) to see how much coverage you are getting into the rooms.  If the APs are mounted on opposite ends of a hallway, it is possible that users in the middle of the hotel are not getting the best coverage.  The best overall solution would be to (1) have the same SSID on all floors and  (2) alternate the AP pattern on every other floor so that the users in the middle of the hotel could possibly get additional coverage above or below them.

Increasing the power for all of the access points might provide more coverage, but since client transmit power is constant, the difficulty of clients not near the AP sending traffic back to the AP would still persist. 

With that being said, the first thing that should be done is an informal, or even a formal survey to determine what coverage the clients are seeing.  On top of that, you should connect to the SSID as a client in a room the furthest away from the AP and look in the Virtual controller to see how well the client has connected to understand the signal strength of the client.

thank you very much for the information.  I will try to plead with them to do a survey but i doubt they will do it.  or pay for us to fly out there and do it.   

not sure if this helps but here is a tech support dump

I deleted the tech support, because it contains personal information.  It also does not say anything about coverage, which is the first thing that has to be determined before anything is changed.