If you skipped part 3, The answer is not 42. It’s Channel Planning, well, don’t. Go back and read it, as 80% or more of the answers are there. Nevertheless, there are a couple more things one can do to tune a lot of APs in a small space for the best overall performance.
Lower the power,
especially on R730s
Possibly the most controversial suggestion from a Ruckus Networks point of view, but the R730 is very powerful device. As a company, we have traditionally pushed maximizing what you can get out of a single AP, but our entire exercise here follows from the idea that we have more APs than we need.
In this case, we really want to cover only one classroom,
and we don’t want signal leaking out much past that room and its immediate
surroundings – there are other APs there. In a first after over nine years at
Ruckus, I’m recommending turning the power down on an AP. In this specific scenario,
where an R730 will be in such close proximity to neighboring R730s. The clients
in the same room will be at point blank range with minimal obstructions and no
walls. Here, we are much more concerned with reducing self-interference of the
network as a whole.
For other AP models, rely on a site survey to see whether or
not you have already gotten enough RF separation from the 20 MHz channel
setting before doing this. More on that below.
Raise the BSS minrate
to 12 Mbps or 24 Mbps
By now, this should be a standard recommendation
anyway. The BSS minrate is the minimum
speed at which a device is allowed to connect to a WLAN. The default is 2 Mbps
on a Ruckus network, and 1 Mbps from most vendors. Those numbers were set
several Wi-Fi generations ago, and are unreasonably slow in WLANs with maximum
speeds well over the 11 Mbps.
Raising this will go a long way toward eliminating ‘sticky client’ problems that some clients suffer from. We don’t …