Problems with wireless clients

[hcolindres]

Good morning, everyone.

We’ve been experiencing issues with our network. We currently have two 300 Mbps ISPs and 29 Meraki Access Points, each with two SSIDs: one for guests and another for organization members. However, users connected to the Wi-Fi rarely reach speeds above 150 Mbps and experience an average jitter of 40 ms on speed tests, even with only a few users connected. They’re noticing unusual instability in the network.

After running some tests, we’ve observed high interference among the APs, and when pinging a wireless client from the Meraki dashboard, the graph shows frequent spikes, with latency varying between 90 ms and 10 ms or sometimes more.

Wireless client

Wired Clients

As you can see, the wired clients’ graphs show stability and not many spikes.

The AP are connected to a MS120P and this MS120P is connected to an MX that receives the ISPs.

Could anyone help me understand what might be affecting the wireless clients? If additional network information is needed, I’d be happy to provide it.

Thanks in advance.

Extra: This is how Ookla opens when you try to do a test.

[DarrenOC]

Wireless survey?

[BlakeRichardson]

x 2 Did you undertake a wireless survey? There could be many causes, interference from other Wifi networks, AP placement the list goes on. 

[cmr]

Do you have the wireless profile set to 20MHz channel width for 5GHz, or are you using 2.4GHz?

Do you have the AP power levels set to automatic, or are they manually set?

[Brash]

+1 for a wireless survey. There's really no substitute from a proper wireless survey being performed.

In the meantime, you can check some information around interference under Wireless -> RF Spectrum

[thomasthomsen]

If you just ping a random wireless client, that is just "sitting there", it might show you a graph that looks like yours, because a lot of wireless clients do power save on their wireless NIC.

This means it signals the wireless network that it is now going to sleep, the AP buffers the traffic, and advertises the client (traditionally in beacons) that there is traffic for it and it should wake up.

The clients NIC then polls the AP for the buffered traffic.

This of course is something that happens very quickly, but it will show up in fx. continuous ping graphs.

Sometimes, but not always, depending on the client, OS, driver and so on, the wireless NIC might not go to sleep while connected to power.

If you experience trouble while just doing normal operation (work) on a client, then, as many has suggested, you start troubleshooting at layer 1 and do a wireless sitesurvey, to ensure that signal strength, interference, noise and so on, are ok, so that the client can get the signal it needs, in order to perform well for your applications.

/Thomas

[GIdenJoe]

Pinging towards wireless clients usually is not that stable.

If  you can see the PHY rate on the clients please do check.
Then check on the Meraki side what the SNR of the client is (if you go to an AP status page you can see each connected client and his upstream signal strength which is the SNR).  If it is above 30 dB your connection is excellent.  Then you still need to check the airtime utilization on the channels of the AP on the same page.  Also check which channel the clients are connected on.  If your 2.4 GHz radio is busy and your client happens to be connected on 2.4 then that is normal.

Having 150 Mbps speed on a wireless client is excellent throughput if you have multiple clients in that area.  If your application requires low latency and/or low jitter then you will need to check airtimes, QoS tagging on your wireless frames (by doing an OTA capture).