@COLE1 wrote:
Thank you.
1) Is that to say that a further away/slower connected PC will affect the others? Does the connection drop down to the lowest common denominator, or just slower in general?
<CJOSEPH> - Clients that are further away take longer to transmit data, and faster clients will have to wait on them to send data, which will hurt throughput. Clients that are further away are also more likely to retransmit, hurting performance even more.
a) is the 20-25dB threshold number the same as the SNR? When working on this last year I recommended that we aim for a SNR of 25dB.
<CJOSEPH> That is SNR. Try at 20 and increase based on feedback.
b) I'm all for enforcing some sort of threshold, but I'm assuming this may result in a reduced coverage in certain environments? As management waffles between wireless as a luxury (best effort for coverage) and mandatory infrastructure, I'll need to time my responses to ensure I am able to secure the equipment to support these higher quality connections. *note: this week it IS important!
<CJOSEPH> - This will decrease coverage in certain environments, but it is applied per SSID so that you can have regular coverage for enterprise clients on that SSID, but best-effort coverage for clients on the guest SSID. In areas with better coverage, it has the side effect of having clients make better decisions about roaming, as well.
2) I don't think we've run into issues with DHCP leases at this time. We reduced leases to 8 hours on the open network and have approx 200 addresses available.
3) Would dropping broadcast and multicast traffic have any negative effects on the end user experience?
<CJOSEPH> - The vast majority of traffic is unicast and most broadcast traffic is useless and can be discarded. "Useful" traffic like ARP and DHCP are always allowed, however.
So even though the users are sitting in the "OPEN_SSID-guest-logon" role, they could still be consuming bandwidth and possibly passing traffic? Furthermore, if they are further away and connected at slower speeds they could be slowing down connections for users that are actually using the network?
<CJOSEPH> - Correct. The extent of the degradation depends on your specific network, and the clients, however. Every probe request or any routine data that is sent by those clients, and all other clients on the same channel (not just same access point) cannot transmit at the same time.
Because it is an open and broadcasted network, I'm assuming there is no way to prevent these automatic connections (besides the fact that we made it open and broadcasting so that users would find it easy to connect!), or force them to disconnect after certain amount of inactivity? We currently have the disconnect set for 30 minutes, but we consistently see reported connections, only to click on them and find them reported as "inactive."
<CJOSEPH> - Unless you make it a WPA preshared key network, many clients will simply associate to the strongest open network. Even if you disconnect them, they will just come right back if they are in the area. With all that being said, it would still be interesting to hear from users who have to deal with this and what they are doing.