Wireless Design Tricks to Treat your Clients

Supporting your Wireless Network should never be a scary situation.

In this article we will go over some simple wireless design best practices that can help avoid a poor experience for your wireless clients and support staff. 

Do Not Frankenstein Your Wireless with Vastly Different Access Point Models

Mixing old and new Access Points in your environment can cause unforeseen issues in your Wireless Network. Any Access Point in which your client can roam should be considered the same environment.

Always replace ALL of the Wireless Access Points in a complete area, such as a building, when doing an upgrade. Clients that connect to newer Access Points that are supporting new spectrums, modulation rates, and features may not be able to seamlessly roam to the existing older models of Access Point.

Clients on older model Access Points may stick to the older modulation rates when moving in the space, instead of roaming to the new Access Point and increasing their throughput.

Features, such as 802.11ax, may not be supported on the older models, enabling them on your SSID/WLAN may create a problem where they can no longer be broadcast on the older models or the system will not allow you to enable them because of the older models in the environment.

Newer Access Point models might require backend code upgrades, if using a Wireless LAN Controller, which may not be compatible with the older Access Points. This will force you to choose between the two models in an unplanned timeline. A plan that swaps out all of the Access Point from the beginning avoids this problem.

Newer Access Points usually employ more radios and require more power. If you are utilizing Power-over-Ethernet, the current switching infrastructure may not be ready for the new 802.3bt power requirements for the newer models forcing them to come online with radios disabled. Port speeds to take advantage of those faster modulation rates also comes into play where the new Access Point supports 10Gig rates but the switchport is only a 1Gig maximum data rate.

Simple one-to-one swaps of Access Point can cause further problems. If the Ethernet cables running to that Access Point are not CAT5e, CAT6, or CAT6A, the new Access Points may have issues pulling power and communicating back to the Switchports.

Troubleshooting issues on your campus is always more difficult if you have multiple models of Access Point that were released at vastly different times. Bugs that only impact one of the Access Point models that you have deployed, may mask the symptoms, creating sporadic and inconsistent client reports. You may also be forced to move from a code that supports both models, to one that only supports the newer model to resolve a bug.

Never mix and match different brands of Access Points in the same environment, Radio signal strength and channel assignments are only negotiated within each system, you will not be able to roam between the different brands, and any type of wIPS will see the other brand as a dangerous rogue.

Always treat upgrades as an entire ecosystem, mixing newer and older models of Access Points can hinder the features of the newer models and create a more complex network that behaves worse for the clients you are trying to support.

The Tell-Tale Access Points

Hiding your Access Points above the ceiling might seem like a nice way to keep your office aesthetics, but it comes with many more issues than you might imagine.

During the design phase, any predictive designs would not be able to utilize the built in algorithms to support an above ceiling deployment. You will notice that there are no settings to enter the material of the ceiling in order to calculate dB signal loss or to enter in any other obstacles such as metal air ducts and fire suppression water pipes that might reflect your signal in ways that are not desired.

When a user starts complaining of a wireless issue, the first factor that always will come up is signal strength and proximity to the closest Access Point. If the client does not know where the Access Point is located, they most likely will default to request additional be installed. It will also be potentially difficult to figure out what Access Point they are trying to connect to, since any labels added to the Access Points will be hidden with them above the ceiling. Stickers used to show where there is an Access Point above can be much harder to find than an Access Point hanging off the ceiling, and cannot be verified until someone gets a ladder to check that the Access Point is still there.

The LED lights that come on the Access Points are there to help you, but you cannot see them if the Access Point is above the ceiling. Does the Access Point have power? An easily answered question if you can see those LEDs, if not, do you need to look up the status of the Access Point on the Wireless LAN Controller or if you know the switchport the Access Point is attached to and it is providing PoE. Depending on the brand and model, LEDs can also tell you if radios are enabled, the Ethernet is connecting, if there a DHCP issue, and/or if the Access Point is in need of replacing.

Speaking of replacing Access Points, when it is time to upgrade the Wireless Network, finding all of those hidden Access Points can quickly become a nightmare if the location maps have not been meticulously updated. A time-consuming cable trace through the ceilings might be required to find all the Access Point locations if there were any failures that resulted in the old Access Points no longer broadcasting.

From a safety aspect, when Access Points are mounted above the ceiling, sometimes they are not mounted at all, but placed directly on the drop ceiling tiles. A small water leak can quickly compromise the integrity of those tiles and find the Access Points crashing down from the ceiling. Not that a ceiling tile is meant to hold Access Points to begin with, and as Access Points become heavier with additional radios and antennas, the likelihood of an Access Point coming down only increases, putting the people, equipment, and the Access Point itself at risk. In large deployments, the effort of double-checking that all Access Points are mounted properly can be a serious, but important burden.

The Signal is NOT coming from inside the Conference Room!

In an office environment, the conference room is one of the most critical areas to have the best wireless connection possible. All the users in the room are almost guaranteed to be on the wireless network and also streaming voice and video with colleagues and/or clients is required.

Not having a dedicated Access Point(s) designed to support your larger conference rooms can quickly degrade the experience for users. The same material that can dampen sound can also dampen the wireless signal, and the higher the frequency, the harder it is for the signal to penetrate different materials. Was a wireless site survey conducted to ensure to verify 6GHz coverage in the conference rooms? In the end, the worse the signal strength, the slower the modulation rate that can be utilized.

If the Access Point is positioned in the hallway, it is more likely to have more distant clients connected and a greater number of clients. Both can dramatically increase the spectrum congestion on the Access Point depending on the number of clients and their distance from the Access Point.

It is always best to design for Access Points placed inside the conference room as a priority, to ensure the fastest connections for those users as possible.

Do Not Let Old Access Points Linger

It can be tempting to leave old Access Points up in a warehouse or factory environment, even an office environment if the Access Points were mounted in the ceiling. It can be expensive and disruptive to pay someone to find and remove all the old equipment if not collocated with the new deployment, but for the security of your network, it can be essential.

Beyond being a simple electricity drain, unmanaged Access Points on your network can quickly become managed by someone else and become a backdoor allowing unregulated access. Even if the ports the old Access Points are connected to are disabled, a switch upgrades, a reboot, or an unwitting administrator might enable the port. Now the old equipment becomes a Rogue network, but even more invisible, since that equipment has always been there.

Even simply unplugging in the network closet is not enough (besides leaving a mess), if during a switch upgrade the dangling cable is mistaken for being an active connection that was missed and is plugged back in.

You should always remove, wipe to factory settings, and recycle all of the old hardware as part of the decommissioning process. It is the only way to be sure.

Hopefully you found this short list of Wireless Design Tricks useful, and have a fun and safe Halloween!!