Poor S4B Voice quality in wireless since last week

[trendkill]

Hello Friends,

We have 25 MR52 access points running on MR 25.14.

Signal becomes less than 20 dB for affected clients. After disconnecting & re-connecting the signal becomes normal.

Client balancing is on

Channel utilization becomes jammed most of the time for both 2.4 & 5 GHz.After rebooting it becomes normal.

Aggregation is enabled, running on 2 Gb, with one POE enabled port

AP's are not running on low power

Generally there's no impact but users are definitely facing voice quality issues

Kindly suggest

[ThibaultH]

Hi trendkill,

Could you give us more informations about your clients ? (Smartphones, laptops ? Which model ? Quantities ?)

What you're relating here seems to be linked with roaming issues (still connected on a far away AP, even if there's another one with better signal available. The action to disconnect/reconnect is kind of forcing the new connection on the nearest AP)

I suppose you're talking about a VoWiFi environment ?

I would suggest first to test : 

- Raising the minimum bitrate of your SSID (the value should depend on your clients 802.11 oldest compatibility)
https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Radio_Settings/Minimum_Bitrate_Control
This would influence a bit the roaming decision from the client

- Disabling the client balancing (except if you have A LOT of active clients)
This functionality is sometimes misinterpreted by clients and behaviours could be affected

- Forcing your channel width to 20MHz 
https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Radio_Settings/RF_Profiles#Channel_Width_-_Available_only_on_5_G...
This should influence the available airtime thus making your channels less jammed

Furthermore, I'd look into setting up 802.11r & 802.11k standards, but not as a first pick here 
https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/WiFi_Basics_and_Best_Practices/802.11k_and_802.11r_Overview

🤘

[trendkill]

So I forced clients to connect with 5 ghz band only for my Corp SSID also disabled auto channel width and selected 20 Mhz. Worked like a charm. Only the b & g clients were affected for which we have already replaced their laptops. Dual band still enabled for Guest SSID as ppl still use some phones with 2.4 

[PhilipDAth]

Check out this VoIP best practices guide for MR.

https://documentation.meraki.com/Architectures_and_Best_Practices/Cisco_Meraki_Best_Practice_Design/... 

[PhilipDAth]

ps. VoIP over WiFi is always painfull because you don't have control over the RF.  It can run great for six months, and then someone shifts in next door, upgrades their WiFi upstairs, etc, and your VoIP over WiFi degrades - completely outside of your control.  Often you can't fix it - apart from putting in more and more APs.  And then sometimes the VoIP devices don't roam properly and you get another wave of issues.

[NolanHerring]

Did you also happen to upgrade to 25.14 in the last week that you started having issues? Might want to roll-back to 25.13 or upgrade to 26.6 and see how things go. I've seen too many issues now with 25.14 for me to go to it.