Wireless Access

We have a 1Gb bandwidth to our campus but wireless access to our campus dorms is via a single AP-275 mesh portal on one building to another AP-275 mesh point on top of the dorm. There is fiber running to a PoE switch that supplies power and data to the mesh portal. On the dorm side I have the mesh point connected to another PoE switch in the dorm that has cat5 running to eight AP-275 access points (four on each floor). There is a plumbing and electrical hall that runs between the top and bottom floor rooms and the access points are spread evenly down this hallway. The dorms hold approx. 108 students (two per room) and while Wi-Fi access seem, sufficient during the day, we have been getting complaints of slow connections at night when the access points are being utilized the most.

I inherited this setup from the previous admin and I realize the bottleneck is probably the mesh portal/point, but I'm looking for suggestions on how to tweak the mesh portal/point switches and access points to provide the best throughput.       

Try enabling Broadcast Multicast Optimization on the VLAN that is tied to that interface.  That is the equivalent of Broadcast Filtering on a Virtual AP.

Thanks, I will look into that this morning!

Any other tweaking I can do to the mesh portal, mesh point, switch settings, controller settings?

I have a 7210 controller running 6.5.4.8.   

That is the first change you should make and then re-evaluate after that.

I am fairly new to networking, so bear with me.  There are not any VLANs set up on the controller that are specific to that buildings wired network VLAN.  The only VLANs set up on the controller are specific to the three wifi user roles.  All of the students are on VLANs 320-339.  I can turn on BCMC optimization for those VLANs, but it wouldn't be specific to the dorms location. 

What VLAN is assigned to the wired AP profile of that AP?  What VLAN are users who get ip addresses at that site in?  That is the VLAN I am talking about.

This is an old dorm and there is no fiber to the dorms and no wired access to each room.  New dorms will be built soon and the mesh portal/point was put in place a couple years ago to attempt to give students better internet connectivity.

The wired VLAN on the switch in the dorm is the same as the building the mesh portal is on (10.1.17.x).  The wifi IP address given to the students on the APs on that same VLAN is 10.32.x.x - 10.33.x.x).  Currently, we allow only  internet access for wifi.  

In other words, the VLANs the students are on and the wifi IP addresses given to the students are not building specific like our wired VLANs are.  They pull the same ip addresses regardless of where they are on campus even though VLANs and wired ip addresses for each building are different. 

The ip address for each ap in the dorm is 10.1.17.x and the ip address for each student is 10.32.x.x-10.33.x.x

You should enable broadcast multicast optimization on the VLAN that has 10.32.x.x