Wireless Access

Hi everyone,

I am working at a school which has over 240 APs on 2 controllers across campus. Due to historical reasons, many of the classrooms has mixed model of APs, namely, AP-61 and AP-105, a single and a dual band model respectively.

My problem is that I noticed that very often most clients will associate with one of the two APs in the classroom,  APs are mounted on different ends of the same wall, and students are mostly evenly distributed in the room, so they should have almost equal coverage. Due to APs different capability, I needed to assign them to different AP-group (AP-61 with band-a enable, AP-105 with both a/g band enabled), but both are assigned with the same ARM profile, with band steering turned on, and prefer-5GHz.

My question is that will ARM works across different AP-Groups (with the same Virtual-AP assigned) and also whether it will works if the AP-Groups belongs to different controllers (under the same master)?

Thanks a million in advance.

Cheers

Kenneth

ARM will work across different AP groups.   You will have inconsistent results if you turn on Band Steering where two APs, one single-radio and one dual-radio are within earshot of each other.  You should leave it off so that clients can make their own decision.

If you had the luxury (and you do not), you would put the AP61s together and the AP105s together and turn on band steering for the AP105s.  Since you do not have a choice, leave off Band Steering and Spectrum load balancing all together.

Thank you for the reply, that might explain why I am having some strange issues, since I have band steering and spectrum load balacing both turned on. Very often most clients would stick to a single AP while igoring the other nearby. Not so much trouble in rooms with single AP or rooms with APs that are the same model, but a lot of trouble in rooms with mixed models.

I would switch off band steering and spectrum load balancing, see how it goes.

Cheers

Kenneth