topic Re: Roaming Surface Laptop 4 in Wireless

Roaming Surface Laptop 4

mb700cisco — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 21:18:22 GMT

Has anyone had any success changing the the Roaming Aggressiveness on the Intel Wi-Fi on Microsoft Surface devices ? Clients are roaming constantly even when connected to an MR56 AP with good signal.

Re: Roaming Surface Laptop 4

aleabrahao — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 21:41:17 GMT

You can try disabling the lowest bit rate on RF profile.

Re: Roaming Surface Laptop 4

Brash — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 21:58:20 GMT

Check the Intel wifi nic driver version if there's and known bugs or updates

Re: Roaming Surface Laptop 4

mb700cisco — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 21:59:44 GMT

What bitrate would you suggest ? we have about 11 APs on this particular floor, less than 150 users.

Re: Roaming Surface Laptop 4

aleabrahao — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 22:04:44 GMT

try active from bit rate 12 or 24.

Re: Roaming Surface Laptop 4

Philip D'Ath — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 22:43:32 GMT

I have run into LOTS of problems with the Intel WiFi chip set on Surface's.

I would disable power saving on the WiFi NIC with these commands to save yourself a lot of grief:

powercfg /SETDCVALUEINDEX SCHEME_CURRENT 19cbb8fa-5279-450e-9fac-8a3d5fedd0c1 12bbebe6-58d6-4636-95bb-3217ef867c1a 0
powercfg /SETACVALUEINDEX SCHEME_CURRENT 19cbb8fa-5279-450e-9fac-8a3d5fedd0c1 12bbebe6-58d6-4636-95bb-3217ef867c1a 0

Re: Roaming Surface Laptop 4

Philip D'Ath — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 22:48:31 GMT

It could also be because of the AP performing client balancing (offloading a client to a less used AP). You could try turning this off:

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Radio_Settings/RF_Profiles#Client_Balancing

If client balancing is causing your roaming - you could also hurt the WiFi network performance by turning it off to make sure users stay connected to the "strongest" AP.

Re: Roaming Surface Laptop 4

mb700cisco — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 23:43:57 GMT

Wonder if we are seeing this more due to active balancing on 29.x if that's now enabled by default

Re: Roaming Surface Laptop 4

Philip D'Ath — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 00:23:14 GMT

That could easily be it.

Re: Roaming Surface Laptop 4

mb700cisco — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 10:27:48 GMT

Just checked and there are no 802.11v events in the logs even though balancing is enabled and supported on the client, maybe a driver issue...