CorEnfa

Thanks again! The switches are long in the tooth and they're hitting pretty close to capacity, so that's on the short list to replace (but that's 60-80 switches. $$$$) The bandwidth throttling is killing us. This is a college campus with most people using wifi. The 5mb/s limitation is way below expectations. But my network manager is telling me he thinks removing restrictions will blow up the network. In my previous network, I had a LOT more clients and no throttling. We had newer switches and a 10g backbone though. Thanks!

Mikeyd101 - thanks for the great reply. We too shot for distribution first and density second, but obviously, someone was over-compensating when it was designed originally. ;-) - Dual band, 2.4 and 5 with channel restrictions. Though I just found out, we're allowing B and G on the network too. I've asked to have B capability shut off. - Pretty sure we're all connected at 100. - We're using Intermapper - I'm not thinking we're overcrowded for number of devices per AP given our high quantity. Also, we may have 50 devices connected to a single AP, but that factors that a student may have a streaming device, laptop, phone, and tablet, but only 1 or 2 of those are using any considerable bandwidth at a time. - Our new WAN connection is 10Gb/s into an ASA with 5Gb/s capability (upgradeable to 10Gb/s) to a gig backbone out to 10/100 closet and distro switches. I'm trying to go gig closet to 2 gig distro to 5/10 gig core. That takes serious moola. I'll look into the upgrade stipends. We're in WA, so it's certainly different, but I'll check anyway. We're purchasing some tools right now to help evaluate air/radio quality. I'm curious to hear about that some more. Did this help your wireless and wired network? Do you bandwidth throttle any of your clients, APs, or network segments? Did you see more headroom at your switches? Less packet loss, etc.? Your reply was quite helpful. Thank you!

Good morning! I'm going to apologize in advance as I have quite a few topics I'm going to cover here and I don't expect any one person to try to solve all of my problems. I'm more here for a sanity check than anything else. I just took over a small to medium sized IT department for a small college. We have roughly 2000 students and up to 900 employees all with multiple devices. My network team has already established the network itself and I see quite a few huge problems here. First, our Wi-Fi is terrible. We're using Aruba APs and WCs with both N and AC WAPs. Here are the issues with wireless: - Our team has throttled all of the APs to a max of 5mb/s saying that any more than that and the network can't support it (we are tying them back to dated Cisco 10/100 switches then back to a 6509). - We have TERRIBLE Wi Fi on campus. Despite having 750+ APs on a 95 acre campus. I honestly think some of our APs are stepping on each other. - Rogue APs are causing major problems. Someone fires up a personal hotspot and everyone in a 50' radius loses complete access or their speed goes to a crawl. Second, our VLAN infrastructure seems hosed up. - I have 180 VLANs. Basically, that's 5+ per building. 1 for standard wireless, 1 for secure wireless, 1 for wired, 1 for the APs, and 1 for printers. Voip also gets its own VLAN in each building too, so in many buildings it's 6 VLANs. I've suggested that all VOIP can go on a single VLAN for all buildings, all wireless can go on its own VLAN or 2 (for address space if needed) - We need a separation of broadcast domains between faculty/staff and students, but that many seems VERY much overkill. - I think our outdated switches (2960 and 2940) are having a hard time with that infrastructure and would benefit from a much simpler setup. I welcome your thoughts, suggestions, and overall related stories that might be of help. I'll happily answer questions as they come up. Thanks!!! J.