users being kicked off APs or roaming issues

[EliseNemeth]

Hello,

I have a customer within a Meraki Wireless environment and they are stating the clients are roaming when connected to the APs OR being kicked off when connected to the APs, what would cause that? Would that be something in the configuration?

thanks

EN

[RaphaelL]

Hi ,

We would need much more info on that issue. 

What MR models,  what MR firmware version. What type of SSID and configurations. What are the error logs from the dashboard. What are the client type ( Windows , BYOD , IOS , Android )

[EliseNemeth]

Okay, that's what I figured. Thanks!

[UKDanJones]

I suspect that 802.11v is doing what it should be and trying to balance the client load. The issue is that if you don't know how it does that it can have unintentional consequences.

Unfortunately, even if you turn off client balancing in dashboard it doesn't actually turn off 802.11v. Therefore the only way to stop this from happening is by having a good RF design with an understanding of the types of client's and how they choose to roam. 

Normally when I see this it's that APs are turned up too loud and all the APs by entrances and exits have the majority of the client devices attached. 

The issue is that 802.11v tries to force the clients to do things they don't want to do. Some clients will them blacklist those BSSIDs as they don't play nicely. Then you end up with wi-fi dead spots etc. 

in short - either do some troubleshooting by running packet captures to see what’s happening (I’m willing to bet it’s 802.11v) and then do a redesign. Or just do a redesign. 

[EliseNemeth]

I appreciate the details, thanks.

[RJordan-CCS]

We had similar problems at a site in the last few weeks, all MR44s except for two MR32s that were put in to fill bad spots while more MR44s were on long backorder.  Disabling client load balancing helped, but did not eliminate the problem, which had the clients roaming to APs with poor signal quality, then bouncing back to one with good quality.  All firmware up to date.  These would occur several times per minute on affected clients even if the client was not moving, but was not happening all the time; sporadically one or more clients would start having issues at about the same time.   RF and Health were unrevealing, showing no particular issues.

Two additional items were found last year.  First was that most of the problem clients were HP laptops with Realtek controllers.  This affected both fixed and roaming clients and impacted multiple customer sites; our techs tried both switching users to USB wireless adapters for a while (which helped) and testing different drivers, and then found one Lenovo Realtek driver that worked on the HP laptops to significantly reduce (but still did not eliminate) the problem.  "Realtek wifi RTK8822BE-CE Ver 2024_0_8_134

At the time (10/2022) others reported similar problems corrected via newer HP drivers but that didn't work for us.

And we do not see similar problems at sites with non Meraki APs  (to be fair totally different sites that may have more AP coverage due to cost).

[PhilipDAth]

The AP might ask the client to roam.  The AP might be overloaded, or it might have determined another AP would provide better performance.

Some buggy drivers disconnect instead of roaming.

A roaming event while connected should not be considered an issue - this is simply the network using smarts to improve the overall system.

First step - try updating the WiFi drivers on an affected machine.  I would recommend getting the driver from the WiFi chipset manufacturer rather than the OEM of the computer manufacturer.  OEMs can be very slow at providing driver updates for embedded controllers.