Getting two Cisco WAPs to serve the same office space on the same SSID

[paul.madden]

Hi,

I have an office in an older building with lots of brick, cement, pipes, and it isn't very hospitibal to wireless signals. I have two Cisco WAPs, a Cisco 1140, and a cisco 1140, I can get more detailed information about what IOS they are running, but at this point I want to know if this is even possible on any IOS with any Cisco WAP's. Because the reception isn't very good between between floors I'd like to one access point on each floor, both broadcasting with the same SSID. Since there are parts of the office where both WAP's are visible it was causing problems having two WAPs use the same SSID, I'm wondering if there is a way to get the WAPs to be aware of eachother and support the same network on. Ideally, I would like a WAP upstairs, and a WAP downstairs, both WAPs are plugged in to the network, and users connect automatically to whichever WAP has the best signal strength. I looked into creating a repeater, but there are too many users for both floors to bottle-neck through one wired connection on one WAP.

Is this possible? I looked a bunch of documentation from Cisco here but it didn't seem to offer the solution I wanted:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/wireless/access_point/12.3_7_JA/configuration/guide/s37hot.html

[Leo Laohoo]

Your issue isn't going to be an easy thing to fix unless you get more WAP.

As you said, your environment has alot of bricks and not a wi-fi friendly environment.  SO with two APs, you'll need to prioritize where you want to put the two in and measure the signal strength at each location until you (or the users) are satisfied.

But for two WAPs to be broadcasting the same SSID, this is possible

[paul.madden]

I don't think coverage is an issue with two WAP's the space isn't too huge so two WAP's should cover it adequately.

So you mentioned that two WAPs can share the same SSID and be in broadcast range of eachother. When we initially set this up we just wonfigured both WAPs to serve the same SSID but thought perhaps areas where a user could see both WAPs the user would flip-flop between them.

Is there any special configuration changes you need to make, or should I just be able to setup both WAP's with the same SSID and clients will simply goto whichever one they see first? Would having the WAPs set to not broadcast their SSID cause this problem?

[cadet alain · Accepted solution]

Hi,

broadcast SSID is not the problem here.

You should configure each AP with a channel that is 3 channel away from the other and have an overlap of signal that is 10-15% max.

For this you must do a site survey.

Alain.

[paul.madden]

So far so good! I think it worked. Thanks!