Wireless Access

Hi,

We have an ongoing issue with iPads on a ward which possibly flies in the face of most of the information I have found on google.

We band steer on all APs and the iPads all support this and sit on 802.11a...and are useless, they are just expensive coffee trays at the moment. I was sat with one of the iPads in one location for over an hour and it connected to various APs, all the time on 'a', couldnt load any web pages, then after an hour it jumped on to an AP on 802.11g and it worked fine (for 10 minutes, then it went back to some distant AP on 802.11a).

I then read this...

http://blogs.aerohive.com/blog/the-wireless-lan-architecture-blog-3/iphone-ios-5-and-icloud-is-your-wireless-network-ready

...where 7th paragraph it says that iPads will choose 2.4Ghz over 5Ghz. Is this even correct?

Could it be that there is a 'fight' going on between AP and iPad, AP wanting the iPad on 5Ghz, iPad wanting to be on 2.4Ghz?

Can I manually configure band steering on particular devices? I'v looked on the iPads but the most amount of wifi configuration you can do seems to be either turning wifi on or turning it off.

Thanks for any suggestions people have?

When Band-steering has been enbled on VAP and the controller will enforce the client to connect on "a" band.

Client will fip to "b/g" band only after trying 6 times failed on "a" 

I read through the 7th paragragh, it tell me IPAD select the 2.4Ghz over 5 GHz since 2.4 Ghz will stronger signal from the ap to the client on the RF. To over come this, We have a band-steering featue to push the client to connect on "a" band which is interference free and can connect on 5 Ghz 20 mhz channel for IPAD`s.

There shouldnt be any issues or fight  being AP wanted to be on 5 Ghz and client wanted to be on 2.4 Ghz as long as we have a proper coverage on "a" band across the floors. Controller should be able to handle the steer the clients between "a" and "g" depenfs on the RF.

You will not be able to manually confgiure band steering on specfic devices.  Thanks !

http://community.arubanetworks.com/t5/Aruba-Instant/Band-Steering-Feature/td-p/71218

http://community.arubanetworks.com/t5/ArubaOS-and-Mobility-Controllers/Troubleshooting-band-steering/td-p/35313

Please go through the above link for more info.

Hi

We have had a connectivity issue very similar to yourselves but with bandsteering off. Did you ever get a resolution?

We are currently awaiting the general release of 6.3 to enable Client Match and then progress from there.

I had some similar issues with two identical iphones 5s when I didn't previously have it with older iOS devices and WPA2/ent.  It would work fine for a while but if I locked the screen and then returned a few minutes later, it would indicate it was connected but not pass any traffic.  The only fix was to turn off/on the wifi on the phone.   I turned band-steering off and it persisted.  I then tried the following and so far, 3 days without an issue.

wep-key-retries 2   (this is the default, but I had it set to 1)

no dot11k-enable  (in the dot11k profile, uncheck the feature)

Hope that helps, I'll update if the problem comes back.

arubasecrets,

What version of ArubaOS are you running and what access points are you using?  

802.11k is off by default and some clients have a problem connecting with it on.  Is there a reason why it was turned on in the first place?

Its 5.0.4.15 and AP125s.  Not sure how or why I turned on 802.11k but not surprised if it was causing an issue then.  It only seemed to affect iOS 7.  I had a iphone 4s that I upgraded to ios7 and thats when I first noticed it.  Worked fine previously.  But since I made the change last week I have  not had a single instance of this issue happening.  Yay!