Cisco Best Practice for Intel Wireless Adapter & Power Saving settings

[Gehrig_W]

Hello Cisco WLAN experts,

this big university hospital uses hundreds of mobile Windows PCs for early morning visiting of our patients. Nurses and doctors often complain about application interrupts on these PCs, as soon as they enter the patients rooms. In a first examination I checked the WLAN settings and found out, that the PCs WLAN speed suddenly decreases from around 300 Mbps in the floor down to 26 Mbps in the patients rooms in one direction. Checking  the characteristics of the WLAN card while standing in the rooms, I can see big differences between Receive and Transmit for example 300Mbps Receive while only 26Mpbs on the Transmit side. We are using 9130-APs in nearly every second room meanwhile in addition to WLAN APs on the floors. I digged a little deeper into the Power Saving settings of one of those PCs.In Control panel ->System&Security->Power Options -> Change Planned settings -> Wireless Adapter Settings -Power Saving Mode

I can see that Maximum Power Saving has been configured:

Also the Device Manager Power Management shows "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power"

I just want to know, if these settings are Best choice and Best practice within an Cisco 9800/9130-WLAN. Is it possible that these settings cause application meld downs and crashes that we see on these devices?

I also noticed that we have disabled the lower speeds in 5-GHz according to Cisco Best Practice for years. Now, with a higher density of WLAN APs, we operate with reduced Sending Power RF profiles to avoid interference. Is it still convenient to disable 6 and 9 Mbps speed or should we allow the lower speeds for the safe of connection stability ?

Thank You for checking and good tipps.

Greetings from Frankonia

Wini

[Leo Laohoo]

What are the wireless NIC drivers?

[Gehrig_W]

Hello Leo,

Our PC client team is using an original Intel driver build on 4.9.2024 Version 23.80.1.3 on the Intel Wifi 6 AX201 160MHz card.

The list of adapter card settings is also a good point for discussion. Eventhough the card allows channel bundling up to 160MHz, I can seen only "Auto" or "20MHz" in the configuration setup.  It is hard to understand which of Intels WLAN card settings are best in Cisco WLAN evironments.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005585/wireless/legacy-intel-wireless-products.html

Do You have a best practice answer on all these parameters and how  they fit best into a CISco WLAN ?

Kind regards

Wini

I can see windows driver

[Leo Laohoo]

The last supported firmware for the Intel 8265 card is 20[.]70[.]32[.]1. 

When we had them, I would set the "Preferred Band" to 5.0 Ghz and the "Roaming Aggressiveness" would be set to "4".

If "802.11n/ac/ax Wireless Mode or HT Mode" settings is present, I would manually configure "ac". 

Personally, there is no real benefit to enable "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" and I would turn it off.  And under Intel's "U-APSD support" settings, it states:  We have identified interoperability (IOT) issues with certain access points that result in reduced RX throughput.

[Scott Fella]

Identity the roaming behavior of these devices.  Find a room or room's that are the biggest complain and start there.  You should be able to replicate the issue and gather the data you need.  An ap in every other room is okay, if you have good signal penetrating to the rooms that have no ap's.  Roaming to an ap above and or below can cause issues, or possibly where the care givers works in the room.  Tweaking your wireless to set your min and max TX power along with disabling more data rates can help a lot.  If your ap's are mounted in a good location within the room, that also helps.  I have seen ap's mounted near the door and then signal does not penetrate the restroom area to provide good signal to other rooms. Data like is the client roaming to the nearest ap, what band is the device connecting to, are the ap's mounted in a good location where users have been complaining, thinks like that, you need to gather.  Just pushing changes to the end devices will not fix an unhealthy wireless deployment.