AP seems to be overwhelmed

[AnkitSharma1]

Hi Experts

Users are complaining about poor connectivity Is channel usage casue?

Please suggest me solutions 

[Brash]

There is very high interference in that 2.4Ghz channel. 

2.4Ghz is often susceptible to interference due to the number of devices and limited amount of non overlapping spectrum. This can become an issue is even medium density areas.

See if there are any channels that have less utilisation (the Meraki spectrum analyser can help there). Work with your clients to use 5ghz (most computers the days support it).

Or identify sources of interference and turn them off. These can be anything from neighbouring AP's to other broadcasting devices

[AnkitSharma1]

@Brash  thank you for the reply ..can I enable the band steering?

[Brash]

You can certainly try. 

Have you confirmed that the clients reporting issues are on the 2.4Ghz band?

[AnkitSharma1]

Sorry that i have not checked..

[DevOps_RC]

While it's not a perfect tool, the AP neighbour section, might provide evidence as to what is causing the high interference. It's an EA function, so you need to enable it:

Once enabled, you can then drill down into each AP to look for overlapping/Interfering APs:

Alternatively the RF Spectrum section might provide some evidence, but neither of these tools will identify what would be causing any non-802.11 interference...you'll need some proper kit to determine and identify those issues.....

Best advice is the same as @Brash  and @alemabrahao , try to get your devices to prefer the 5GHz frequency. I've used band steering and client steering within the Meraki config, but I've had to disable them as it seemed to cause connectivity issues.

Good luck, I hope you manage to move your clients towards less cluttered spectrum 🙂

[alemabrahao]

Nowadays it is very common in 2.4Ghz (Amount of users in 2.4, neighboring APs, other unidentified interference, all of this can influence), my advice is to use 5Ghz whenever possible

[DarrenOC]

Sorry to hear it’s overwhelmed, maybe give it a couple of days off. 😉

[AnkitSharma1]

Team,  I think There is a bandaid fix that I can apply to maybe boost performance on those access points. If we increase the minimum bitrate on those access points it should allow for those device to be able to accommodate more throughput