Wireless Access

I have a 4504XM controller managing 32 AP-135s. I was having some connection problems so i got a monitoring tool called Acrylic Wifi Professional. Unfortunately, the monitoring tool was showing a very disturbing results with the 2.4 GHz radio. There was constant break in the graph which showed the strength of the signal. But in the 5.0 GHz graph, it was a constant flow without any breaks.

I thought it was interfearance which i also think was being managed by ARM. Kindly find attached images from the Acrylic Wifi monitor. Any suggestions why i am experiencing this and a solution to it will be much appreciated.

Thank you

Mr. Charlie,

I  am not personally familiar with that tool.  If you could show us a screenshot of the controller dashboard > Performance screen, that would give us more information.

Thanks for the quick reply cjoseph :-)

Kindly find attached as requested.

Mr. Charlie,

The snapshot of your network does not look bad, at all.  Most of your network looks good, but you have alot of clients so degradation could occur. There are 4 access points in the 2.4ghz, where the "channel busy" is between 40 and 50 where you could be  having performance issues depending on the application in use.  Click on that number 4 and see if that is the area where you could be having problems.

What kind of problems are you having?

Hi,

thanks very much for our support. The channel utilization figures keep fluctuating, never the less i will check that.

Also the main problem i am having is that, clients complain of constant diconnections from teh WLAN which is very disturbing for productivity. I saw an article that suggested that checnging the logon role to guest solves the problem. I did change it, but unfortunately, this does not help my situation.

So after i saw those constants breaks in the graph i attached in my first post, i assumed there is a break/loss in the radio signal which causes the client to loose the connection as the graph was showing.

Mr. Charlie,

I am sorry to hear that.  Do you have another tool, like inssider that you can use to monitor the status of your network and compare it?  In addition, the laptop that you are using to monitor the network, should not be attached to the WLAN or running any other WLAN monitoring software.  Sometimes the scanning introduced by being connected to the WLAN or running other WLAN monitoring software will introduce scanning on your laptop and create issues.

If you send me a PM, I can send you a link where you can send your logs.tar so we can take a quick look.

Hi Joseph,

for the other monitoring tools, i have Wifi Analyzer, which is a mobile app for wifi connection analysis. There is also a very strange results from this tool. It has the channel rating app to check the current channel the AP is using and also suggest better channels. Unfortunately if i select the 2.4ghz  to check the channel, it says "No signal" and then after some time it start to get the signal and provided the required results.

Please find attached.

Mr.Charlie,

Unfortunately, Wifi analyzer is not a commercial tool and it has its limitations.  The best thing to understand if wifi is not transmitting is to constantly capture on a channel and filter the beacons to see if they are being transmitted correctly.  In some cases there is congestion and beacons are not being transmitted.  If wifi was completely cutting out like in your first screen capture, you would have alot of people complaining.  If that is not the case, I think the problem could be with the tool, and not necessarily the wifi.

What type of user is complaining and how often?

That is very true about the connection problems, but the thing is, sometimes, tho it is connected, but no data is being transmitted so the wifi shows that its connected just that there is no traffic or data passing through. So most of teh clients see that as the internet just being slow. Some of them are also running the LAN parallel to the WLAN so they do not have much problems.

Can you kindly elaborate further on which tools i can use to capture the channel and if wireshark, how can i do that because i kow wireshark captures per interface.