I have a school that has recently update/upgraded their wireless infrastructure. They had a number of dead zones, and areas with poor coverage. We performed a site survey and identified a number of locations that required some additional coverage. One area was the school library. The nearest AP (1131AG) wasn't providing much in the way of signal to this room, in fact it was quite void of any signal entirely. The entire library was double-thick cinderblock, lots of glass, etc. On paper it looked like a great place to add another AP.
We've also been purchasing newer 3502i AP's as most if not all of the equipment we are purchasing these days support 802.11n, and the throughput limitations of the 1131's is starting to be noticed. They are for the most part 3+ years old.
We installed a new 3502i in the Library, however in a test with about a dozen laptops yesterday almost all of them associated to the old 1131 that is almost 100 feet away, down the hall in another room.
Connectivity to the 3502i is fine, my phone was associating with it, along with a couple of other wireless computers, but this group of laptops all keep going back to the 1131.
I went back today with my personal laptop and sat about 10' away from the new 3502i and my own laptop associated to the distant 1131. I see no signs of interference via spectrum analyzer, just good signal in both 2.4 and 5.0 bands.
Any thoughts on why clients would refuse to associate to the nearest AP with what should be the best signal?
