jrronimo
New Around Here
Hello,
I've been tasked with improving wifi in our really old building. This building is spread across one 10-floor tower and three sections of the building built in roughly 20 year increments. We've been using off-the-shelf APs for some time now, such as EnGenius EAP300s/350s and HP V-M200s, but there are other brand APs in the building. We're noticing a lot of clients who don't seem to to be connecting to the strongest access point or, if they do, they seem to have slow or no internet access. Sometimes a client will connect and show "four bars", but have very little throughput.
This network needs to support several hundred clients over the course of a day (mainly people's personal phones/tablets/etc., but some work laptops) and ideally we want all of the SSIDs to be named the same -- we are in part a public institution and want to provide open wireless access, but we also filter clients we trust onto separate networks using our DHCP server by MAC address. I've done my best to separate the APs into non-overlapping channels. I've experimented with Isolation, Station Separation and every setting I can find in the EnGenius APs, but I cannot for the life of me make this network work well and it is very frustrating, both for me as an IT person and my clients as people who want wifi, haha.
I realize this is a highly unorthodox setup, but it's the one we've got. We especially notice problems with OS X machines staying connected to our network.
Do we need some sort of controller? Or maybe it's time for me to take some sort of wireless networking class? I'll do whatever it takes to get this set up right, I just don't know where to look at the moment. I just can't seem to find much information online about large wifi deployments in a situation like this...
Any help would be appreciated. Thank you so much.
I've been tasked with improving wifi in our really old building. This building is spread across one 10-floor tower and three sections of the building built in roughly 20 year increments. We've been using off-the-shelf APs for some time now, such as EnGenius EAP300s/350s and HP V-M200s, but there are other brand APs in the building. We're noticing a lot of clients who don't seem to to be connecting to the strongest access point or, if they do, they seem to have slow or no internet access. Sometimes a client will connect and show "four bars", but have very little throughput.
This network needs to support several hundred clients over the course of a day (mainly people's personal phones/tablets/etc., but some work laptops) and ideally we want all of the SSIDs to be named the same -- we are in part a public institution and want to provide open wireless access, but we also filter clients we trust onto separate networks using our DHCP server by MAC address. I've done my best to separate the APs into non-overlapping channels. I've experimented with Isolation, Station Separation and every setting I can find in the EnGenius APs, but I cannot for the life of me make this network work well and it is very frustrating, both for me as an IT person and my clients as people who want wifi, haha.
I realize this is a highly unorthodox setup, but it's the one we've got. We especially notice problems with OS X machines staying connected to our network.
Do we need some sort of controller? Or maybe it's time for me to take some sort of wireless networking class? I'll do whatever it takes to get this set up right, I just don't know where to look at the moment. I just can't seem to find much information online about large wifi deployments in a situation like this...
Any help would be appreciated. Thank you so much.