Mobile devices always seem to have packet loss

[dhatcher]

Hey Everyone,

I was troubleshooting an iPad in our environment that seemed to be randomly disconnecting. Long story short, I got curious and started pinging devices from the Meraki dashboard (Network Wide > Clients > pick a client > click the Play button for the ping tool in the lower right).

Every single mobile device I checked and I checked 10 or so at my site and our San Diego site all seemed to experience some kind of packet loss. Usually between 9-30% (sometimes more).

Just curious if this is a known bug, has anyone else run into this in their environment? Seems really out of the ordinary. 

[PhilipDAth]

Was it just iPads - or other devices?

I run a Lenovo T440s using Ubuntu, and run on WiFi 99.9% of the time off an MR42 and an MR33 running 25.11 firmware.  I frequently ping remote destinations to test them, and don't have any issues.

[dhatcher]

All mobile devices (laptops seem to be behaved as far as I can tell). Android, ios. All seem to include some amount of packet loss. 

[PhilipDAth]

Perhaps they are going into sleep mode to conserve power.

[dhatcher]

No the particular iPad in question is a controller for our Zoom room and it’s been specifically set not to ever sleep or lock (it stays plugged into power all day). I could see if that were the case with a couple devices or if they were moving between APs at the time but, I can pick any mobile device at any time and ping it from the MX100 and get packet loss between the device and the MX100. This also happens in our San Diego office with an MX-64 and MR42 APs. 

[BrandonS]

How does channel utilization and  RF spectrum look?  Maybe you are having interference causing this.

[MilanR]

I have the same issues guys. Any luck Dhatcher? How did you fix this issue?

[dhatcher]

In our case we actually found by replacing the security device with another (same model) the issue went away. Hardware? *shrug* 

[MilanR]

Oh! Now i don't think in my case it will be hardware as all other device connected through wifi seems to be fine. It's just iPads that gets dropped off. Btw how stable is your ICMP request to the wifi devices? Mine one is 1% success. 

[dhatcher]

We had a lot of weird latency issues and packet loss internally, in addition to devices getting dropped and our network occasionally going offline for 20-30 seconds at a time. Ultimately, we swapped to a spare device and all our issues cleared up.

If it's just your iPads, have you inspected the environment around the iPads? Are these stationary devices (like Zoom Room controllers) or do they move around frequently? Are they in some kind of protective case that might be interferring with the wi-fi signal? Do they sit next to other non-wifi interferers like wireless keyboards, bluetooth headsets etc?

Those are some things I could think of off the top of my head that could contribute to poor wireless reception just to a specific device type.

[brad1]

I would check the handoff between AP's and then focus on the RF frequencies and tweaking them.