Aironet Extensions

[hrios]

We provide wireless to a university of 34,000 students, staff, and faculty. As you can imagine, our users have devices from a wide range of manufacturers, and we do our best to support them.

Recently, I had problems with a few devices that couldn't communicate with our APs. Turning Aironet Extensions solved the problem.

My question is, what are the drawbacks of disabling Aironet extensions? I know that is needed for load balancing, MIC, TKIP, etc. Any other things we'll be missing by disabling this option? I just want to make sure that we are not compromising performance just cause we want to accomodate a few users.

our wireless network:

288 APs

1200 and 350 series AP

All running IOS 12.2(13)JA3

thanks!

[sbilgi]

A Cisco client chooses the "Best AP" based on Signal Strength, No of Clients, Transmit load and number of hops to back-bone. When a client roams from one AP to another, it scans for APs (using probe request) and evaluates the best AP based on the above parameters. Most of the above parameters are supported as part of Aironet extensions. Turning Aironet extensions off on the Cisco APs means that Cisco client will not be able to make an intelligent decision as to what is the best AP to associate while roaming and load-balancing.

[hrios]

Thanks for your reply. Do the capabilities provided by Aironet extensions only apply to Cisco clients? How do non-Cisco clients then choose a good AP to associate to?

thanks again