How Can i overcome competing access points?

[zed111111]

I work in a tall office tower. We have 4 105s that have over 80 conflicting access points. We have alot of dropped connections going on and i suspect the other ap's since our coverage is complete.

[Jamie E]

Wow thats some serious spectrum abuse. I would venture to assume there was not any channel planning for your neighbors?

Have you performed any analysis?

[zed111111]

Other than those detected APs, I have not. I am new here and i am coming from Meraki APs.

[cjoseph]

zed111111,

That is expected in an office tower environment to see tons of access points, because there is alot of open air, and your access points have GREAT receive sensitivity, so they can see alot of things.  The main thing to keep in mind is that it only becomes a problem if the signal or energy rom those foreign access points is so strong that it "drowns out" or signficantly conflicts with the signal between your APs and clients.

How many is the maximum simultaneous clients do you have your our wireless network?

How many WLANs are you broadcasting?

Do you have drop broadcast and multicast enabled?

[zed111111]

We max out at about 165 clients. A mix of laptops, tablets, and smart phones.

We have 3 WLANS 1 guest, 1 for employees, and one for contractors.

Broadcast and Multicast are both disabled.

[cjoseph]

Are you using Instant (IAP)?  So you should have Broadcast/Multicast ALL http://www.arubanetworks.com/techdocs/Instant_40_WebHelp/InstantWebHelp.htm#UG_files/CaptivePortal/ConfWLANGuest.htm

Is that what you have configured?

[zed111111]

Broadcast and Dynamic Multicast are set to disabled. Should i set broadcast to all? and enable both multicasts?

[cjoseph]

Broadcast Filtering to ALL:

Do that on all of your networks.

Edit:  This is especially important if your wireless clients share a layer 2 VLAN with wired clients.