insane80

We first had the system as just one controller and 4 APs covering 6th form and the cafeteria area for them to use for BYOD. This was expanded around a year ago to cover the other school buildings and replace the old Netgear wg102 APs, with budget being a big concern. We have made some progress with this in getting the 5Ghz rolled into the same SSID as 2.4 frequencies and letting the devices handle what to connect to. Netgear support has also improved as the ticket was raised to a higher level at their end, they've gone through both controllers checking for config errors, nothing major but suggested we turn wmm powersave on and switch RSSI setting to 0 (auto). The upshot is that I'm now seeing speeds between 20-60Mbit/s on average. Although still more fine tuning to be done. As an aside I'd not realised that inSSIDer has a significant overhead and effect on wireless speed results. When it was switched off, speeds became much more stable, if still low.

Hi, I'm a long time lurker on here having tended to find answers by searching but this one has stumped me so I'm hoping that some people more knowledgeable than I might be able to work out what is going on, or at least help me work towards solving the issue. The basic problem is that throughput speeds vary wildly when connected to WiFi within school, anything from 600Kbits/s to 40Mbits/s has been seen on the 2.4Ghz spectrum with similar changes on the 5Ghz frequencies. The setup is made up of 2 Netgear WC7520 controllers, which are stacked and 41 access points. The majority of APs are WNDAP360s with 4 WNDAP350s connected up to external aerials to cover all weather pitches. Currently we have around 200 devices on the WiFi during the main school day but more will be added shortly as SMT want BYOD to be enabled for all year groups. Currently only staff and 6th form are allowed access. Changes made so far: The controllers are set to use only channels 1, 6 and 12 and a channel scan is currently set to run every 12 hours to reduce the chance of neighbouring APs being on the same channel. 5Ghz frequencies have been enabled on their own separate SSID at present, I though that maybe we had just reached a limit on 2.4Ghz and needed to test without the world and dog connecting. Wired speed tests have been run from switches which the APs connect back to when WiFi performance is low and we see a reliable 5-600Mbits/s. Rogue AP detection is turned off. AP transmitting power is set to auto, most of the APs are running at full TX power according to the controllers. Client side hardware: The school has a mixture of laptops, Dell Latitude E6500, E6510 and E6520s, the E6500s are being replaced with new Lenovo Thinkpad E550s. All the laptops used by teaching staff are running Windows 7. The majority of the tests have been run on a single E6510 to keep consistency, but the E6500s and E550s are similarly affected. The E6520s are less so and seem to be more stable and generally have higher speeds than the E6510. How I'm testing: Speed tests have been run using Iperf to both the main fileserver and another less heavily used server. Tests have been run in the early morning before many staff have arrived, during teaching times and after the school day has finished when most staff have left. There doesn't appear to be any difference in the speeds and variations I'm seeing. Using InSSIDer to check signal strength and channel at the times of testing, anything from -40dB to -27dB on the AP I'm connected to at the time of testing depending if I'm right underneath it at the time. The only channels in use are 1, 6 and 12 so the APs have picked up the config. There doesn't seem to be much interference from other external wifi, e.g. nearby houses. We have raised a call with Netgear support who have advised on a few points but currently I'm not filled with confidence that they will find the solution in the near future, hence posting this. Thanks for reading so far and any suggestions gratefully received.