Internet UPs and DOWNs on wireless

[lilnemo]

Hi All,

 

We recently moved and upgraded our one school, we have increased the size of the school and the size of our network. We also took over for a previous IT Director who left us with little to no info of how he set it up. That being said we have increased the amount of our access points and redid the wiring for them. Since sometime in November which was the same time we upgraded the bandwith we have been having problems with speeds on the internet only for WiFi users, they could be standing in one spot and go from 30-35mbps down to 5-8mbps. I have checked a few posts and have tried heat mapper as well as inSSIDer plus contacted our AP hardware provider. The provider said that we have over saturated our WiFi, but heat mapper says different. When I use inSSIDer it says that there are 2-3 homes on the same channel as us. Our AP's have both 2.4ghz and 5 ghz antenna's but when I check the 5ghz thru inSSIDer it doesn't show anything. We are in the process of replacing our network engineer which may be a good thing, but he does not have as much experience with WiFi as he does with hardwired....... Anybody have any ideas? Please help...

[psydii]

Some questions for you to ask yourself:

 

• Number of clients per AP?
  
• Number of devices per collision domain?
  
• What standard do your devices adhere to? (a B radio will cripple an N network probably even if not associated)
  
• What encrytion/authenitcation are you using?
  
• Are your AP's firmware up to date?
  
• Are your devices' firmware and drivers up to date?
  
• If windows 7, have you installed the latest recomended perforamance hotfixes? (List of Performance hotfixes post SP1 for Windows 7 SP1 - The troubleshooters and problem solvers... - Site Home - TechNet Blogs Last updated Dec 2012)
  
• Are broadcasts being propogated from wired side to wireless?
  
• What traffic is on the wlan when the performance tanks? (you might be able to sniff OTA with a macbook and wireshark, but if not try wireshark and port mirroring at your wireless egress)
  
• Is everything on 1, 6, 11 (good) or do you see APs on say 2, 5, 9 as well (very very bad)?
  

 

HTH