Wireless Band Select on 3802 Access Points

[Alex-Pr]

Hello,

I've recently updated a few area of my buildings from to the 3802E and 3802P access points with external panel antennas for a high density of users in exhibit halls.  I am running auto DCA and TCA and have the clean air enabled so essentially all power levels and channels are decided by the WLC.  I also have Band Select enabled.

Prior to this upgrade, I would typically see about 20% of the clients on the 2.4 gig band.  Since I have completed this upgrade to the new AP's I am seeing anything from 50 to 90% of the clients on the 2.4 gig band and thus getting horrible service.  A heavy load on these AP's will typically be in the 150 clients range and I do not have the option to completely shut down the 2.4 gig range.

Do you have any suggestion for how I can improve the band select so I get back to about 80% or more of the clients on the 5 gig band?  All what I can think of is adjusting the antenna gain or manually setting the TX power levels.  Is this possibly a bug in the code for the 3802's?

Thank you,

Alex.

[Nicholas Hood]

Alex, 

We are high density as well in some places (university residence halls) and had the same type issue with 3702 and 3802s. Our solution was to statically assign the 2.4 tx rate to 2 and to channel bond the 5 band to 40MHz while keeping the tx lvl at 1. This basically ensured that the devices would want to choose the 5 over the 2.4, at least in our environment it does. We found by doing this our client base went from a majority 2.4 to a majority 5GHz. Also worth noting that 95% our our client base is apple products.

We considered turning off the 2.4 band but this didn't bode well for users with older devices.

If you do decide to make changes, test test test.