Older clients see SSID of Aironet 1850 but not on newer Catalyst AP9115 (Cat9800 WLC)

[Wendler54030]

Hello,

We're running a Catalyst 9800-CL  with older Aironet 1850 APs and the new Catalyst AP9115. After we try to disabke the older 1850's some older Clients (older notebooks with same old driver gen ~5 years) are not able to see the SSID's broadcasted  by the newer 9115. Of curse there is a driver issue, because after updateing the wifi-card driver, the laptop where to see and connect. But its a free education network and we're are not able to update all private client wifi-drivers.

What did the old access points support but the new ones no longer support? And is there a config change to support the older clients?

PS: WPA3 is NOT enabled

Thanks  in  advanced

Markus

[marce1000]

                         >What did the old access points support but the new ones no longer support

  That is a dead-end question and wrongly formulated. It's the reverse some techniques may be in place such as fast transitioning , roaming settings, or other performance increasing settings. To do the reverse-back-thinking is the wrong                                           approach and up-to-date drivers is better.

  M.

[Wendler54030]

Of curse you're right, but my problem is the availability - also for the older clients. Maybe someone has the same problem and there is a simply config solution that i missed

M.

[Nicholas Swiatecki · Accepted solution]

@Wendler54030 : Some older drivers have a hard time when Wi-Fi 6 is enabled; to verify, try disabling 11ax on the WLC and report back. 

[Wendler54030]

@Nicholas SwiateckiThx, i will try that.

[David Ritter]

indeed.  the Wi-Fi-6 header is not recognized by original Wi-Fi-5 and older clients.  It is very difficult to do a mixed environment until all the clients are updated.  In your use case it probably won't happen.  So turning off .11ax may be your only recourse.  I experienced the same issue at home.. additionally while .11ac protocol 256 QAM only operated on 5g segment, .11ax may run 1024 QAM on the 2g and is vendor specific or some such thing.  as is wpa3

[Wendler54030]

After more than a week, it works. Thanks a lot!