Wireless Access

Long story short: we have been tasked with setting up a makeshift event space on very short notice. 4 AP325s were newly installed in this space, alongside a couple of nearby existing 215s. After a quick test run of connectivity today involving 200ish people, we found that 2 of the 325s consistently had 70-85 clients associated (mostly on 5Ghz) while the other 2 325s had 10 or fewer clients associated. The entire space isn't huge (100ftx50ft) and test devices were evenly placed around the space.

Any ideas why so many devices attached to so few APs? Load balancing in general isn't an issue here, but then it's rare that more than 25-30 clients would hit a particular AP. Controller is running 6.4.4.22 (yes, yes, I know). Thanks for any insight you may have. 

Check the ARM profile (under RF Management) that's tied to the AP group to see if Client Match is enabled. If not, enabling Client Match should help to balance devices across APs that are in the same vicinity if certain APs are overloaded.

What is the transmit power of your access points?  If a client has line of sight in a closed event space, anything more than 12 might look too attractive for him to move.  He will stay even longer if you are running 40mhz channel widths and above.

Clientmatch is good technology, BUT it kicks in after association.  You want transmit power and maybe even removing lower rates in the SSID profile to first influence client behavior, so that clientmatch doesn't have to move clients to achieve parity.  Also, if an AP is closest to a client, that is the AP that you want the client on.  Don't expect clients (especially mobile ones) to be always perfectly balanced.

Clientmatch was already on. I lowered the transit power to between 9-12 on the various APs, so we'll see if that helps. I also disabled 2.4 on one of the 325s and the closest 215.

My biggest concern is why 3/4 of the clients attached to 2 APs while the others combined had less than 1/4 of the clients. I'm testing again today with the power/radio changes as well as  couple other tweaks so we'll see. 

Thanks all for the suggestions!