iPad's Not Connecting to Wireless

[jacob.neher]

All, I am the wireless administrator for a rather large school district in Oregon, and we are seeing numerous issues with iPad's connecting and staying connected to our lightweight AP's in an HREAP configuration.  Our iPad carts have about 20 iPads a piece and an AIR-LAP1142 supporting them.  We have no issues with getting non-Apple products to connect and stay connected, but for some reason the iPads are creating a major issue.  Does anyone else have any experience with this?

We currently run 8 4400 WISM blades via two 6509's, running code 7.0.116.0.

Our AP's are running 7.0.116.0 as their primary software and their IOS is 12.4(23c)JA2.

[Scott Fella]

You don't have load balancing enabled on the WLAN correct?

Thanks,

Scott Fella

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[jacob.neher]

Actually we do, we were having an issue when students were in high school auditoriums and hammering the access points around them, I have seen two access points in one of our theaters that had 90 users each, which as you can tell would be a major issue.  We then decided to enable load balancing arcoss all of our SSID's.

I am aware of the status 17 message, and have seen it as an issue in some of the controller debugs.  We set our client window to 20, and have not seen the status 17 message as often.

[Scott Fella]

Well that will affect you iPads then. Disable that on the WLAN and test.

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[Scott Fella]

Many iOS Devices don't support code 17 so those devices will have trouble staying connected or even connecting when you reach your limit.

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[jacob.neher]

Thanks Scott,

I will try disabling is on one of our controllers that has the majority of our iPad users, and see what happens.

Any idea of why many iOS devices don't support the code 17?  Does Apple plan on remedying this situation?  I don't want to have to create seperate SSID's for PC's and Apple's...

Thanks again,

Jake

[Scott Fella]

I wish I knew that answer, but our best practice is not to enable that feature. It's not just iOS devices. I have seen Dell and HP laptops fail to connect also.

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[Scott Fella]

Also... What encryption are you using. I have seen issues of you have both wpa-tkip and wpa2-aes on the same WLAN.

All my implementations in education I have load balancing disabled due to clients not connecting. It's a give and take.

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[jacob.neher]

We do indeed have both wpa-tkip and wpa2-aes enabled across all our SSID's.

[Scott Fella]

That might be an issue also. You will have to do different types of testing. It is recommended to only use one unless you don't experience any issues. You can always create a new WLAN with the same SSID, of course the profile name would be different. Then you can specify one to use wpa-tkip and the other wpa2-aes. You will introduce more rf though and that's why you should try to use wpa2-aes only if possible. That means your devices must be able to support that.

Thanks,

Scott Fella

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[jacob.neher]

Great, thanks for the information, looks like it is time for a change request to do some testing.

[Scott Fella]

No problem... Just putting my 2 cents in from my experience:). Let us know what worked for you.

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[George Stefanick]

I would add 1 more item to Scotts list, (good list Scott). I received a call from our Researchers (who btw like all the newest toys) that their iPads would drop from the network during video calls.

After closer inspection the session timeout would drop the connection 25% of the time on the iPad and the iPad would not recover, It requried manual intervention to reconnect. We looked at this for a few days and deterimed 75% of the time the iPad would reconnect after the session tmeout. 25% of the time, you needed to recoonect yourself.

We moved the timer up to the MAX and the issue went away.