MR52 wireless instability with Win10 PCs

[Tim271]

Reaching out for advice.  I work for a school district and we converted our wireless network to MR52s last year.  Our environment has mostly Chromebook (students), Win10 (staff), and Mac (some offices) endpoints.  

This past school year, we experienced a lot of wireless instability with Win10 PCs.  The Chromebooks seemed to be ok, but the Win10 staff devices would sometimes experience frequent wifi disconnects.  We've had a wireless survey conducted and worked through this multiple times with Meraki support, but still seem to be experiencing this issue.  What seems to happen is when a Win10 device disconnects, it has trouble reconnecting?

We have a high density deployment with an AP in almost every classroom.  We changed our channel width to 20mHz and created radio profiles to adjust the Tx for smaller and larger classrooms.  We turned off 2.4Ghz on the production ssid and the wireless survey showed little 5Ghz interference.  

We've been monitoring the analytics in dashboard and at times, dashboard is showing a strong signal with little channel utilization while a PC is experiencing a poor connection.  At other times, we are seeing unexpected disconnects with error code 34.  

I've heard of Meraki issues with Chromebooks in the past, but this issue appears to only be affecting Win10 devices.  Any thoughts on what may be causing this or how to remediate?  We've tried turning down the roaming aggressiveness in Win10 and made sure the OS and drivers are up to date.  Thanks for any advice anyone may be able to provide!

[cmr]

Do they have Intel chipsets and if you keep them plugged in (i.e. no power saving) does it stop the issue?

[Tim271]

Yes, they do have Intel chipsets.  I believe that it still happens when plugged in, but that is a good suggestion.  I'm going to try it and see what happens.

[PhilipDAth]

Frequently when I run into these issues it is because of the Windows 10 power-saving settings - especially when only Windows 10 devices are affected.  The usual symptom is everything works fine when plugged into mains power, and the issue only happens when running on battery.

From an administrative command prompt run these two commands:

powercfg /SETDCVALUEINDEX SCHEME_CURRENT 19cbb8fa-5279-450e-9fac-8a3d5fedd0c1 12bbebe6-58d6-4636-95bb-3217ef867c1a 0
powercfg /SETACVALUEINDEX SCHEME_CURRENT 19cbb8fa-5279-450e-9fac-8a3d5fedd0c1 12bbebe6-58d6-4636-95bb-3217ef867c1a 0

 They configure Windows to always use maximum performance for WiFi.

I'm going to guess there is an 80% chance this on its own will resolve your problem.

The second most common issue is WiFi drivers.  Please get the latest WiFi driver from the manufacturer.  Note you may have to go to the WiFi manufacturer (such as Intel) to get these if the computer manufacturer has not supplied an update.

[Tim271]

Thanks for the suggestion.  I'll give this a try.  The thing that puzzles me is that we have another building that has a similar environment, but we aren't seeing the same unexplained disconnects there.  I'll do some testing next week and see what happens.

[RomanMD]

You know what, a setting that's often ignored: Go in the Radio profiles and disable Client Balancing which is enabled by default. 

I have experienced a lot of problems because of Client Balancing, and that should not be enabled if one wants to have a stable environment.

[Tim271]

I finally got around to giving your suggestions a try.  It appeared to work in the building that was giving me problems, but when I returned to a location that did not have a problem, I was experiencing the same thing.  Could this all be a result of interference even if other devices in the same room, connected to the same WAP are not experiencing the same thing?  That is what appeared to happen yesterday.  Granted, there were other non-computer electronic devices in the room and a Mac connected to the WAP as well, but the other PC in the room did not experience an unstable connection.