ruckus wireless bandwidth issues

[localzuk]

Ah, those AP's don't have gigabit ports - I think you were sold the wrong AP's by your reseller there. You'll be able to have 50+ users on the net at the same time just fine, but you'd never get 50 users on one AP doing network activity (ie. domain logon/log off, opening files etc...) as that has higher demands of the network.

 

Think of it this way - if you have 50 users on that device logging in at the same time, they're going to get a maximum of 2Mbps - which is ridiculously low (and you wouldn't actually be getting 2Mbps, as some is used for overhead etc...).

 

When did you have this system installed?

[mtdant]

Because this is a public forum I do not want to name and shame the company that installed them. To be fair to them 10/100 was the norm nearly three years ago when it was installed. It will be three years this summer holiday. That's why I posted because I wanted to see if it was worth buing newer AP's. Would you recommend replacing the Zone Director with a newer one or would this be OK just with any firware upgrades?

 

Thanks for your help

[localzuk]

Because this is a public forum I do not want to name and shame the company that installed them. To be fair to them 10/100 was the norm nearly three years ago when it was installed. It will be three years this summer holiday. That's why I posted because I wanted to see if it was worth buing newer AP's. Would you recommend replacing the Zone Director with a newer one or would this be OK just with any firware upgrades?

 

Thanks for your help

 

The ZD should be fine with firmware upgrades I'd say - but speaking to a Ruckus specialist such as Net-Ctrl would be better to advise.

 

I'd be looking at installing ZF7300 series AP's now, they are a/b/g/n dual radio antennas with gigabit ethernet and can handle a good number of users.

[mtdant]

Can you give me a weba ddress for this company please or shall I find it by Googling it (other search engines are available!)

[localzuk]

Can you give me a weba ddress for this company please or shall I find it by Googling it (other search engines are available!)

 

They're a sponsor on here. Try sending a PM to Aggy - View Profile: Aggy - EduGeek.net

[paulfinlay]

with 802.11abg networks the advertised speed of 54Mbps includes all the overheads associated with WiFi, such as beacons and acknowlegements. You'll be lucky to see data throughput rates of 20Mbps (you can test this out with a tool like iperf). Now the majority of enterprise APs should be dual band so they can run 802.11g and 802.11a clients concurrently. For light web browsing I would expect an enterprise AP to be able to cope with 50 clients providing those clients can be split between the two radio chipsets (maths = 802.11g @20Mbps + 802.11a @20Mbps/50 clients = 800Kbps each).

 

In order to improve wireless performance ensure that all the APs in the same physical locations are using different non -overlapping channels (this means 1,6 or 11 on 802.11g) you can check whats happening around you using InSSIDer.

Broadcast packets on your wired network will be forwarded into the air by your APs and by default broadcast packets are sent at 2Mbps eating up loads of aitime, so you want to VLAN your wireless network off to stop broadcasts effecting the wireless network.

Does Ruckus have a client load balancing feature? Make sure that's switched on.

[localzuk]

Ruckus is a managed wireless system, so channels are automatically chosen by the controller. It actively monitors for overlaps and interference and switches automatically should anything change.

 

The issue won't be the web browsing, it will be the network activity - logging on/logging off, and any heavy activities like streaming video etc... that cause issues.

[mtdant]

Hi Thanks for your input.

 

I did play with VLAN ing the Ruckas but managed to crash every AP in the school and had to reset them with a paperclip to fix it. I think I will try this again in the summer hols. The Ruckas is a bit complicated because every VLAN port has to be tagged and I still haven't got my head round setting this up yet. I have thought for a long time that multicasts on my network were killing the wireless and was considering VLANing the wireless. For now I will VLAN my server farm which uses multicast because this seems a lot easier and less prone to fail.

[mtdant]

Our teachers do expect to stream video so maybe this is the cause of the problem or at least is a heavy contributor.

[localzuk]

Hi Thanks for your input.

 

I did play with VLAN ing the Ruckas but managed to crash every AP in the school and had to reset them with a paperclip to fix it. I think I will try this again in the summer hols. The Ruckas is a bit complicated because every VLAN port has to be tagged and I still haven't got my head round setting this up yet. I have thought for a long time that multicasts on my network were killing the wireless and was considering VLANing the wireless. For now I will VLAN my server farm which uses multicast because this seems a lot easier and less prone to fail.

 

You can't simply pick and choose what to 'vlan'. You have to segment your entire network - so if you intend for your wireless to be separate to your servers, you need to have them in their own VLAN, and the servers in their own too.

 

You then need to set trunk ports on all switches to carry all vlans (ie. have every vlan 'tagged' on those ports), and set the individual ports used by the devices (eg. ap's, servers etc...) untagged on the specific vlan that you wish to use.

 

You also need to have some form of routing device to handle the 'cross-vlan' traffic - so either a specific router, or a layer 3 switch capable of doing the job (HP 5406zl does this for me).

 

Our teachers do expect to stream video so maybe this is the cause of the problem or at least is a heavy contributor.

 

Video can demand anything from a few hundred kbps up to a couple of mbps depending on quality - so its very easy to see it eating bandwidth.

[Michael]

As a general rule I always recommend one Access Point per classroom and not corridors to 'share' the wireless over two classrooms. In pratice it doesn't work and everyone gets frustrated due to poor performance. I've seen this set up in many schools just to save money.

 

Even with the latest wireless N Access Points, you have to be realistic that it won't support more than 15 laptops with decent connectivity. I'm sure 50 laptops connected is possible, just not very practical.

 

When diagnosing wireless issues, I always strip out the security temporarily and run it unsecured. If you still experience problems getting an IP with no security then re-designing the wireless network is a must. Upgrading to the latest firmware (whichever brand) is recommended, running WPA2 AES which is the most secure.

 

Remember it's not just roaming profiles which are being downloaded. The probability is you have AV software downloading updates and WSUS downloading Microsoft Updates to every client, so the more Access Points the better. Installing them in classrooms, as high up as possible (2/3 feet from the ceiling) for the best results.

[nicholab]

The Ruckus AP is treated like a switch you trunk (802.11Q) the port. If your using HP you will want you management vlan untagged and your other vlans tagged.

[localzuk]

The Ruckus AP is treated like a switch you trunk (802.11Q) the port. If your using HP you will want you management vlan untagged and your other vlans tagged.

 

That depends on how you set up your VLANs. Personally, I don't set up the AP's as a trunk device, as every device on them is part of the wireless VLAN and as such there is no point in having to set up special behaviours on the AP, so I leave my wired switches to do it all.

 

And Michael, modern n class APs can handle 50 laptops fine. Look at this user's situation - they can get 13 laptops working ok on a single 54Mbps radio device. Comparing the AP's from Ruckus (the 2900 series with the 7300 series), the original has a guide of 15Mbps bandwidth throughput, whereas the 7300 has 150Mbps bandwith, so 10x as much. Meaning the OP should be able to get 10x the number of machines working at the same level.

[nicholab]

It depends if you have different ssid on different vlan you would then need to present the vlans to the AP. I would at least have a separate vlan for wireless devices.

[Andy_Corrin]

guys i know nobody has replied to this thread for a little while but i know how frustrating that 6mbps connection rate thing is.... I've not read all the posts past the first few so please apologise if the OP got this sorted or someone sorted it for them etc etc

 

Basically, I had this problem in one of our schools (support company, look after 50+ schools).... literally we spent a whole week there trying out different things, settings etc etc with the Ruckus gear to solve this problem.... no joy..... In the end, we got an RF frequency scanner..... turns out, particularly in slightly older schools, that the installed alarm PIR sensors emit microwaves in the 2.4 GHz range.... these sensors pre-date wireless data and they obviously thought it was a safe range to use..... basically they absolutley scream RF interference out from about channel 5 up to about 10.... The origional poster mentions there were only certain classrooms that seemed to get poor performance while others were not problematic. Sounds to me like the working classrooms either a) didnt have one of these particular kind of PIR's in them or b) those Ruckus AP's happened to assign themselves one of the few channels thats far enough away from the interference ( mainly 1 or 13). Those asking why didnt the ZoneDirector swap channels etc.... well my theory is that it only picks up noise from data sources and adjust channels accordingly, not from such things as microwaves!

 

If anyone else is having this issue, defo check your alarm sensors! It absolutley never occured to us that it maybe those until we got the RF scanner (we got the Wi-Spy 2.4i... about 60 quid but proved invaluable). Since we discovered those PIR's we knew what to look for in similar school sites with reported 'issues'....turns out we found those sensors in about 10 more of our schools. A good indication that this is whats happening is to look through the AP's logs in the ZoneDirector, think you have to export to a text file or something but in there you will see a feild 'phy errors' or something.... Those are physical errors.... in our situation these were literally running up towards 100's of thousands in minutes.

 

Anyways, hope this helps the OP and anyone else who stumbles across this thread

Edited July 4, 2011 by Andy_Corrin

[White_Fi]

Great shout Andy,

 

Yes they are a killer for Wi-Fi, especially Chubb, they operate between channels 7 and 11 and kill wifi 2.5 channels away from their centre frequency.

 

Wi-Spy is a great tool for quick and dirty spectrum analasys.

 

Also be cautious of protection mode being enabled in a mixed 802.11b/g network. Even if you don't have any b devices in your work force a visitor or a near-by AP beacon transmitting at 802.11b will enable protection mode on the AP that hears the beacon. In turn the AP enables protection mode and any other nearby APs(I.e your WLAN) will also enable this function. It's a ripple effect throughout your WLAN.

 

All that unessary contention overhead will drop your data rates.

 

Best practises - enable OFDM only and set a min tx rate of 5.5Mbps on you WLAN, of course not if you have 802.11b only devices