Selecting band to mesh outside APs

[Jeizzen]

Hi

I'm wondering

Is it something doable to configure a band (lets say 5ghz) for meshing the APs (ex MR74), and use 2.4 ghz to connect users devices ?

thanks,

[PhilipDAth]

There is a guide for doing this somewhere, but I can't find it.

Basically you manually configure the channels.  Configure all the MESH APs to use the same 5Ghz channel, but different 2.4Ghz channels.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Radio_Settings/Manually_Changing_Channels_in_a_Mesh_Network 

[WifiBestPhy]

Yes, you technically can manually set the channels in order to achieve that.

No, you should never do that.

Meraki employs a whole bunch of highly qualified Wifi, RF, network, and software experts. They made a quite sophisticated auto-channel and auto-mesh system that will pick channels and configure a mesh topology better than you can. The topology that it generates will have user access on both 2.4 and 5 and will dynamically choose the best backhaul setup for you. The default settings will work perfectly fine, resist the call to turn the nerd knobs just for the sake of turning the nerd knobs.

[MerakiDave]

@Jeizzen as others have pointed out it's designed to be as automatic and zero-touch as possible regarding which band/channel gets used.  However, suppose you had a mesh AP out in a field where you wanted to serve a bunch of clients over a mesh link back to the wired gateway AP on a building a few hundred yards/meters away.  Pretty common scenario. 

If you want to guarantee that your wireless mesh backhaul link is going to be using the 5GHz radio and the 2.4GHz radio is used for serving clients (sounded like that was your plan, and is not uncommon to do that) then the simplest way would be to use band-specific antennas on the 5GHz ports.  This would be the 13dBi 5 GHz Sector Antenna (MA-ANT-21) on the 5GHz ports of MR74 or MR76 APs aimed at one another for the mesh link.  Then use ANT-20 omnis on the 2.4GHz ports to serve the clients out in the field.  I have customers doing exactly that, works fine.  Hope that helps.

Here are some of the relevant docs.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Deployment_Guides/Mesh_Deployment_Guide

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/WiFi_Basics_and_Best_Practices/Using_a_Cisco_Meraki_Access_Point...

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Radio_Settings/Manually_Changing_Channels_in_a_Mesh_Network

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/WiFi_Basics_and_Best_Practices/Using_a_Cisco_Meraki_Access_Point...

[Jeizzen]

Thank you for your explanations

I'm still wondering, is there a way to officially configure : ''Users use 2.4 ghz, Mesh use 5 ghz ', so that it is completely separated by configuration

Because:

1- If a user can be 'near' the beam of the 5ghz antennas, he might be able to connect to 5ghz right ?

2- Meraki would theorically still be able to mesh on 2.4 Ghz, if it would be te best mesh ( which should not happen with 5ghz sector antennas)

If at least we could assign an ssid to use only 2.4ghz, that way we could be sure that users are only using 2.4 Ghz. Option that cannot be chosen here:

We 'can ' configure it here , but is this going to shutdown 5ghz for the meshing operation ?

So if also we could configure somewhere to say : 'Mesh, use only 5ghz'...

thanks,