Wireless Access

Not sure which board to post this but hope some can offer advice....Does anyone out here use Vocera badges?  We are a large hospital that does....One unit went live a week ago, the unit is a locked down unit...one area in the unit has become very choppy over the past few days...all my AP's in the area and above/below are working.  The nurse stood still with the badge as I watched it on the controller and the badge was jumping AP's all over the place. The badges don't drop off the network but the caller blanks out and is very choppy.....Anyone with any suggestions on how to troubleshoot would be appreciated.

Thanks, Donna

Questions:

- How long has your Vocera deployment been running?

- Has it worked and now you are having problems, or is this a new deployment?

- What version of Controller Code?

- What access points?

- What kind of encryption are you using for Vocera?

- Did you take  a look at the Vocera Configuration Template in the Roaming VRD here?  http://www.arubanetworks.com/pdf/technology/DG_Roaming.pdf

- Vocera has been running for a year

- No we haven't had any issues

- 5.0.3.3 on the controllers

- AP65's and some AP 105

- PSK encryption

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@Donna wrote:

- Vocera has been running for a year

- No we haven't had any issues

- 5.0.3.3 on the controllers

- AP65's and some AP 105

- PSK encryption

-

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Okay.  New unit opens up and you have problems.  Are you using Airwave or another network monitoring tool to measure the RF on the 2.4ghz side to the RF at other locations?  The Daily RF Health Report on Airwave will give you a good clue if these new access points are worse, from an RF perspective.

No Collin, we only use Airwave....

Also, what model badges are you using?

Can you share the config from the Vocera provisioning server?

We use Vocera and had tons of issues at the begunning but all solved now. 

I'm not sure of the model of badges, I will find out.....what kind of issues did you have and how did you resolve?

Hi Donna,

As Colin was eluding to, please use the  Daily RF Health Report on Airwave as a tool to help us (all contributors) gain perspective on what may be occuring here.

The RF Health Report is Found in the reports section of Airwave and can be set up for a specific 'folder'.  I would recommend setting up such that the APs within proximity to 'the unit' are in a seperate folder and the other APs that aren't causing issues(or don't appear to be) in another folder.

Please run the report against both folders, and we can then assess if there are significant discrepencies in areas such as: 

Noise Floor, Channel changes within 24 hours, Power level changes within 24 hours, Errors on channels, Interferring devices detected and classified.   

Worth a shot to further focus the investigation at layer 1...or higher depending on what the reports will show.

OK, I will do that.  Our badges are models B2000 and B3000.

The audio issue was resolved by updating  to the latest Aruba best practice and disabling "subnet roaming" on the badges.

Vocera B3000 badges will require an updated  badge properties file that could  impact all badges (B1000, B2000 and B3000).   Customer will need to upgrade their Vocera server to release 4.3 or upgrade to the latest service pack.     The "subnet roaming option  could have been updated by the telephony administrator, 

"subnet roaming" should be disabled for all Aruba WLAN deployments.     If the badge roams between an Aruba and Cisco WLAN, "subnet roaming " will be required and voice quality will be  impacted by the DHCP response, during a roaming event.

For all growing Vocera deployments, small VLAN should be used with "VLAN Pooling".     This is  a known working Vocera deployments that will need additional multicast routing between VLANs.