Wireless Water Cooler

Hey everyone. Wanted to bounce some ideas and see if anyone has had any experience with this. Work for a hospital and we are deploying new wirless moblie carts which have Desktop's built in. They are using the D-link USB NIC. I believe model DW-160. We have the updated drivers and have tested using both Window's 7 client and Odessy client to manage the nic. We also recently had a wireless survey done and from that Survey bought new 225's and placed them according to what the Vendor recommened.

When connected everything seems to be working great. In terms of Roaming they do tend to struggle. Biggest issue we are noticing is when these devices do go to sleep, loose connectivy because of coverage or start back up for the first time in a while they have a hard time connecting to the wireless. We are not sure if it's something with the power levels used for in Window's 7 or if there anything we can do on the wireless side.

To me it's obviously the USB nic's. Dell laptops, Macbook pros everything works great. Any advice to give or things we can try? Scrapping this isn't an option as they arelady moved forward on it. 

Thanks

I would start by consulting your vendor and opening a TAC case to start.

It is not helpful, but you should only try to rely on WLAN cards from manufacturers who cater to the enterprise, because you can open cases with them about your problems.  They also test their devices in the enterprise, so if you are seeing a problem, you most likely will not be the only person.

At this point, we would ask you twenty questions here and depending on the answer, it may or may not be part of the solution; not a very good chance if you want to get to the bottom of a problem immediately.  TAC and/or your vendor in parallel with this post is your best bet..

Cjoseph is right, this could be any number of things and might get long-winded.

As an additional thought though...

This sounds like it might be symptomatic of a regional compatibility issue between the client and the APs. I've seen this three times in UK hospitals with different cheaply purchased adapters. And I've seen it with a new Netgear adapter...

http://community.arubanetworks.com/t5/Unified-Wired-Wireless-Access/802-11ac-adapters-warning-heads-up/m-p/121489/highlight/true#M26087

If this is your issue, the client will only be able to attach to a certain number of your APs, and it will look very unstable.

As a quick dirty test, you can check by installing something like inssider on the mobile computer. Have a look at the channels to see if the adapter can "hear" all the APs you'd expect. If it can't the adapter may well have an illegal channel set for your region.

If it does, there is an argument to say these were supplied in an "unfit for purpose" condition to you, and you could demand a swap out. If you do, ask for an enterprise class NIC? :smileywink: