Wireless Access

OK so here's a weird one for all of you. I'm at a client site helping them optimize their network for their VOIP (Spectralink/Polycom) phones. They also have a bunch of Panasonic Toughbooks the doctors use. I turned on some of the usual stuff I do to optimize for voice but as part of that I happened to turn on 802.11h support.  Pretty soon we got complaints about the Toughbooks not being able to connect. Oh and only some of their Toughbooks, the one's that broke used a Intel Wireless-N 7260 card. The one's that work use an Intel 6000 series card.

I went over the changes that I made and reversed things one at a time to see what might be the issue. turned out it was the 802.11h setting. As soon as I diabled it, boom laptop connects. Hmm, I thought. That is weird as the specs online say it supports 802.11h. So I setup a packet capture. The card negotiates the connection right up to doing part of the EAP exchange (they use PEAP) and then part way through the exchange the card just stops responding to the APs EAP packets. I can see an EAP-Request packet going to the client and it just doesn't respond.

Not sure if anyone else has seen this, but was strange enough I thought to post it here for others. PS, client drivers were latest from Intel, from Feb 2014.

It was on channel 153. That was the first thing I thought of when I saw it.

Do these phones support 802.11h ? By default on the controller, on the radio-profile 802.11d & 802.11h is disabled.

Just wondering if we are hit only with specific to only these chipsets ? if yes this could be some thing to do with chipset itself.

Do we also heard issues with any other chipsets and clients as well on the network? The only known issue which we had seen with intel 7260 chipset is when we enable 802.11k enabled. Find below

http://community.arubanetworks.com/t5/Education/Intel-7260-chipset-issue/gpm-p/155046#M765

Thank you.

OK, the 7260 was in the laptop not the phones. The phones do support 802.11h (it's in their best practices guide for the 8440 model). The issue with the laptops turned out to be 802.11k as you suggested. They had this turned on and switching it off resolved the issue.

Thanks for the update. Just to confirm so the issue got solved once we turn off the 802.11k and do we still have issues with phones?

The issues they are having with the phones is not related to 802.11h. The problem they have with them is due to CCI. I am solving that issue separately.

Got that and let us know if you need any help.

Thank you.

I previously had issues with the 7260 chipset with no 802.11k or 802.11h enabled. I saw similiar behavior when doing debugging and noticed that the client stopped responding to the AP's EAP requests. Once intel eventually released the 16.10 and 17.x drivers this fixed it for me and these clients could authenticate and connect.