New Ruckus install - intermittent signal dropouts

[TheElusiveOrangeButton]

We're currently installing about 90 new Ruckus APs in our school and so far we've installed about 50% of them. As it's the summer break, there are very few people in, mainly just us IT guys with a laptop or two and our phones. We've noticed that when we're using a device that's connected to the new wireless network, the connection will occasionally drop out for a couple of seconds, and it will then reconnect, and it can happen to one device while others remain connected. We established that it seems to be that a device will leave the 5GHz band in order to reconnect to the 2.4GHz band, or vice versa, or even drop its connection to an AP it is sitting underneath in order to connect to an AP in the next room (or two floors down in one case). Has anyone any idea what's causing this, and/or how to prevent it? We've only just started with this new system and already it's driving us a bit bonkers, and if we're feeling like this now the teachers will really let us have it upon their return!

[Blue_Cookeh]

Are you using a Zone Director or standalone APs? Is band steering turned on?

 

AFAIK roaming between 2.4 and 5GHz isn't seamless, so you need to force them onto one or the other, or configure band steering/roaming properly. This is typically why a lot of APs will split the two frequencies into different SSIDs.

[LeeCSE]

For the client devices switching between APs it sounds to me like there is too much channel overlap, try turning down the power of your APs and see if that makes any improvements.

 

Have you enabled Band Steering on your Ruckus devices (maybe not a good idea if your school supports BYOD)? That could help with the switching between the 2 bands. Or you can always split your 2.4GHz and 5GHz Bands on separate SSID’s. Call the 2.4GHz SSID “Wireless” and call 5GHz SSID “Fast Wireless”. Users with 5GHz devices then tend to select the “Fast Wireless” SSID. Users with 2.4Ghz devices will only see the “Wireless” SSID. Or if your devices are all 5Ghz capable and you could turn off the 2.4GHz Radio where they're not needed?

[gbtb]

Hi Everyone, Thanks for the replies so far.....

 

The APs connected are to a SmartZone 100 which is pushing out the settings to the APs, the SSIDs are being broadcast only once and then the devices are picking either the 2.4GHz or 5GHz based on which one it decides is the better signal at the time.

 

 

Things we have tried so far:

 

We have turned off Band Load Balancing and also Client Load Balancing

Turned off Mesh mode

 

We have 4 SSIDs, Staff, Student and Guest with Devices SSID hidden from broadcast, devices and clients connecting to the staff and student SSID are using 802.11x authentication and this seems to working ok as they are being allowed access to the SSID.

Edited July 26, 2017 by gbtb

[AlanD]

FWIW I've not had a good experience with Band Steering. Devices that support both bands often "see" the 2.4GHz from good distances away - and perhaps in offices away from classrooms which get a strong 5GHz signal. But band steering recognises the devices capable of 5GHz - and drop the connection, after which they attempt to connect at 5Ghz - but because the signal is weak (because 5Ghz doesn't go through walls so well) the client soon drops the 5Ghz (or barely gets any data through the connection...and finally reattempts to connect at 2.4Ghz and so the process goes on with a very poor experience for the client. Tried turning down the 2.4Ghz power even further - but that resulted in no connection (or poor connection) at all for devices outside the classrooms themselves. In the end we decided it was better with band steering left off and allowing the clients to decide for themselves - which they do a much better job than they used to with more modern WiFi cards. We do use load balancing and it seems pretty good at shunting a few users in classroom onto weaker but lightly used APs further away which gives greater total throughput in bandwidth in a dense deployment. What is best for the occasional user is not the best configuration for a dense number of users - and I guess its a good test for the management software who well it copes with dynamic channel widths. It would be nice to image that they are capable of noticing a single AP under heavy load - and say giving it an 80Mhz channel temporarily while surrounding ones are 40MHz....but changing what it does temporarily kicks all the clients off onto poor neighbouring APs addining to loss of bandwidth by the time they are forced back again to the wider channel being advertised.