Adding more MRs to our environment

[JMY34]

Hi everyone. We are a small school district that has a fairly small/simple Meraki network spanning 5 school buildings. We're having trouble with wireless performance in a couple of buildings, one of which is our main Elementary school. Two classrooms right next to each other on the second floor get bad performance, the teachers' laptop won't receive district emails until she brings it home after school, she has trouble connecting to her chromecast, and kids sometimes lose connection as well. We have the possibility of adding another couple of MRs, but my question is, will we need to run an ethernet connection through the drop ceiling to the nearest switch? The model is MR52. Thanks.

[PhilipDAth]

When you have a dense deployment, you always want to cable attach your access points to a switch.

There is not enough information to offer much guidance.

In a dense deployment, try and turn off 2.4Ghz spectrum.  Only use 5Ghz spectrum.

I assume you have at least one AP in each classroom?

I assume the teacher can connect and get email when the classroom is not full - or is it permanently broken?

[JMY34]

Sadly no, there isn't one AP per class room. The system was designed before I came aboard. There's 24 in the entire school building. Is 1:1 the best rule for coverage? Looks like the nearest APs to the problem area are two in particular. One AP has about 10ms latency, the other one has almost 150ms latency. As far as the teacher receiving email when the classroom is empty, I will have to check with her further on that question. I would love to try turning off 2.4ghz, I just don't want to boot anyone off who needs it. I'm pretty sure all the devices are now 5ghz compatible now, between Teachers' laptops and Students' Chromebooks.

[PhilipDAth]

>Is 1:1 the best rule for coverage?

If you have students using lots of devices - yes.

As a general guide, 1 AP per 10 students will provide excellent coverage, 1 AP per 20 students will provide good coverage.

>I would love to try turning off 2.4ghz, I just don't want to boot anyone off who needs it

This is the actual choice you are making - kicking off a small percentage of devices so that the vast majority will get a greatly improved result.

[PatWruk]

You don't have to run an ethernet connection, but you will need power. If it doesn't have a direct ethernet connection it will Mesh with another AP that it can reach and the traffic will move to another AP wirelessly to reach the internet. 

The downside of doing this, if it can only reach one other AP and that one goes down due to power loss, upgrade, other issues then you lose that AP as well. 

Here is some documentation on wireless mesh: https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Wi-Fi_Basics_and_Best_Practices/Wireless_Mesh_Networking