Wireless Access

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Access network design for branch, remote, outdoor, and campus locations with HPE Aruba Networking access points and mobility controllers.
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Quality "poor" - is this an actual problem?

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  • 1.  Quality "poor" - is this an actual problem?

    Posted May 23, 2017 11:51 AM

    I am trying to understand what the controller dashboard is telling me. I've got red text saying "poor" for quality on an Access Point. (see image 1) The help popup says  it is based on noise floor, channel utilization, interference and client association.

     

    Looking at the details (image 2) the total clients is 57, which is high but I still have 7 spots available, the other values seem ok I think.

     

    Is it just because of the number of clients or is there a real problem?

     



  • 2.  RE: Quality "poor" - is this an actual problem?
    Best Answer

    Posted May 23, 2017 05:57 PM

    I don't see 'Poor' as an outright problem, but it's definately something to take into consideration if you are striving for killer performance.

     

    My guess is that the high client number is driving the 'poor' status.

    It really depends on use case though. If users want to associate and grab email or a basic web page their experience would probably be fine. Concurrent streaming of 4k video... eh not so much!

     

    The scary part about high client association is that ARM functions start to degrade as the user counts rise. The channel scanning becomes less frequent since the AP hardware is busy with users. There's also a threshold (can't recall the exact value) where ARM will stop adjusting channels if too many users are associated. Dedicated AirMonitor's are a good idea for areas where AP's are user-heavy.

     

     



  • 3.  RE: Quality "poor" - is this an actual problem?

    EMPLOYEE
    Posted May 23, 2017 07:20 PM
    @LyndenMark wrote:

    I am trying to understand what the controller dashboard is telling me. I've got red text saying "poor" for quality on an Access Point. (see image 1) The help popup says  it is based on noise floor, channel utilization, interference and client association.

     

    Looking at the details (image 2) the total clients is 57, which is high but I still have 7 spots available, the other values seem ok I think.

     

    Is it just because of the number of clients or is there a real problem?

     

    "Poor" is just a way to alert you that something could be wrong.  Maybe that access point always has 53 clients on it every day, but their throughput not be good as a result.  Yes, the item in red tells you how it reached that score..