Controllerless Networks

I have 4 Instant AP 105 units up and running. The up and downloads on them are a fraction of the capacity compared to the same laptops being plugged into the network.

I am seeing speeds around 3mbs on wireless vs 100+mbs when wired. These are speeds copying from a fileserver that is on the local office network. Some clients are coming up with weak signal, but show good speed, including the laptop I am using, which is about 8' from a ceiling mounted unit.

Security is WPA-2 Enterprise and is auth Radius against a Win2008R2 server

2.5 and 5 Radios are set to adaptive assignment.

Aruba hardware is new to me, so  I am not sure where to start troubleshooting the units. I did read through the forums and saw a few things to try like setting the channels manually incause of interferrence, which could be the case on 2 of the APs but not the other 2.

They are various Intel based  aircards. All in Lenovo laptops. Models range from X200, X220, X230 Tablets, and T430 and 440 regular laptops. The X220 infront of me has a Intel Advanced-N 6205. All drivers up to date.

I have also seen the slow behaivor on my iPhone.

JonM,

Do you have broadcast filtering set to "All"?  http://www.arubanetworks.com/techdocs/Instant_40_WebHelp/InstantWebHelp.htm#UG_files/WLAN_SSID_conf/ConfiguringWLANPro.htm?Highlight=broadcast

I have Broadcast filtering set to ARP.

I changed it to All, restarted the APs and the speed is still very slow.

Please open a support case in parallel.  There are quite a a few variables here that should be investigated if you are to get any short or long-term relief.

Thank you Colin, I have gone ahead an opened a support case for the issue as well.

It sounds like an RF related issue to me. While connected, verify in the client table of the virtual controller to which AP, on which band and mode and on which channel you're connected.

I've seen this issue when there was lots of co-channel interference in 2,4ghz band and the clients got headaches when choosing AP ending up with bad choices. Perhaps this won't be your issue with only 4 APs but worth a shot to verify what you're acctually connected to.

If you turn out to be connected to 2,4ghz, try setting your client manually to 5ghz to see if that increases your speed.

AP105 is a 2 stream device so you should be able to nearly max that 100Mbit line of yours with good RF conditions.

//Chris

I checked, of the 28 clients connected right now, 7 are on 2.4Ghz, All the others 5Ghz.

Is this low throughput the same for all of the clients? Both 2,4ghz and 5ghz? What firmware version are you on?

Yes we are seeing the slow throughput on clients using both sepctrums.

We are on firmware 6.3.1.4-4.0.0_44126

JonM,

Are those APs on switches?  Can you see if any of the switchports have errors on them?

@cjoseph, They are on switches, however, I do not have access to them yet so I can not check.

We found some improvement when we checked the laptops and changed the Roaming aggressiveness to highest (5), we jumped from about 3mb to 15mb.

The next challange will be to see if I can push the setting out as a policy over AD.

I thought I would close the loop on this question incase anyone else searches and finds it in the future.

Our issue was 2 fold. The first issue was with the version of the OS running on the IAPs. The version we had a known bug which would cause perodiac disconnects for users wireless devices.

Upgrading the the most recent OS resolved the issue.

The second issue is a bit embarassing as it was an oversight. The transmit power on the access points were still set to their default power level. To overcome the noise threshold in our location I needed to bump the power a bit which gave us a stronger and cleaner connection, we saw our data throughput improve after.

You're not using bandwidth contracts or Airtime fairness features?

We do have Airtime fairness enabled, I do not know where the option for Bandwidth contracts is located?