Help Thinking Through Some Clients Not Seeing SSIDs

HarleyBurton
Here to help

Help Thinking Through Some Clients Not Seeing SSIDs

I have dug around and found some information that is helping me draw a conclusion, but I would greatly appreciate any other insight that any of you may have.

 

The gist is that we have some clients who are unable to see any of our SSIDs.

 

I have a typical dual-band network and I have two AP models (MR46 and MR86).

We're at firmware version 27.6 now, but we have had the issue through two updates (3 versions).

Our Service Desk people are telling me that all of the clients with this issue are Windows PCs.

         -We also see a lot of chromebooks that can't do 802.1x authentication, but that's a separate issue.

 

I originally had Band-Steering enabled in our RF Profile, but I learned that it can be problematic for some clients, so I have disabled it for 2.4 and 5Ghz in the Profile. That reduced the complaints, so it seems to have been the problem for some users, but not all.

 

I also found a lot of people having this issue with fw version 25.x, but I think we deployed with a 26.x firmware and have updated twice. Currently version 27.6 and still seeing the issue.

 

Just today I found that Intel 11.ac Chipsets using an older driver can have problems seeing SSIDs for 11.ax enabled networks. I'm going to try to get our Service Desk folks to take the time to look at the chipset and driver versions when they see the problem, but they are swamped, so I'm crossing my fingers they'll help me out.

 

So, I'm looking for anyone who has seen this same symptom and found it a cause other than those that I've listed.

 

Anyone reading this forum is probably very well aware of how big a complaint "wifi" is in a BYOD environment. Regardless what we spend, and what system we deploy, there will always be a lot of people screaming "the wifi sucks." I just want to know that I have done everything I can to make sure that it is as good as it can be, for as many people as I can accommodate. 

 

4 Replies 4
KarstenI
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

The intel problems are well known, but with the newest drivers it typically works well.

I would think about separate SSIDs for 2.4 and 5 GHz. Makes it easier to distinguish what the client can see and restricts inter-band roaming.

Thanks for the tip. We have actually talked about doing that. Trying to remember now where it landed. I should probably bring it back up.

cmr
Kind of a big deal
Kind of a big deal

To add to what @KarstenI said, the Intel drivers were fixed about 3 years ago so should definitely be updated anyway!

Yeah. That's why we love BYOD so much. It's getting very rare, but still happens that people have 802.11b devices they bring in asking why they don't work.

 

About 2 or 3 years ago, a man brought a Windows CE Pocket PC in.

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