Band Steering Issues in latest stable firmware

[pjc]

Hello

We are currently experiancing issues with clients connecting to the 2.4ghz radio of an SSiS that is using dual band - band steering.  If I turn off BS then they connect OK.  We are running latest stable firmware 24.8.  The SSiD is using Vlan tagging

Is band steering broke in the latest production version ?  Anyone else having issues ?

Thanks

Paul

[BHC_RESORTS]

Not really an answer, but we have never had any luck with band steering. In particular, iOS devices fail to work more often than not on it. Personally, I'd recommend turning the band steering off. The AP steering makes a pretty good decision on which AP the client should connect to, and since it isn't a client decision, tends to be a little more stable. Also as an aside, the stable track 24* is pretty old. There are a lot of bug fixes in the beta track, on 25.5 now.

[PhilipDAth]

I normally turn 2.4Ghz off all together for corporate networks.

I tend to use band steering on guest networks, and I haven't had any customers report any issues back to me.

[cantechit]

 I have to agree 250% - Band Steering has never worked for my deployments and has always caused more problems than it has solved.

Part of the issue is the way various client adapters interact with the wireless network is the job of the drivers/adapter/OS.     

Many client adapters that are 5/2.4 will stick on 2.4 even if their adapters are set to prefer 5 -- for various reasons.

Bottom line - you shouldn't be designing for 2.4 anymore,  design for 5 - turn on 2.4 if REQUIRED, and for those devices, have a different SSID.   Dual band SSID's don't work overly well on any Wireless solution IMHO. 

[Steelyeydwifimn]

I've noticed that when the SSID is  set to use band steering only the 5Gz SSID is advertised. This means that any 2.4Gz clients

must use an active probing to get onto the 2.4Gz SSIDs. You must choose dual band for the 2.4 SSIDs to be seen. Apparently this is the method which merkai use for band-steering. see this

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

hope this helps?

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@cantechit wrote:

 I have to agree 250% - Band Steering has never worked for my deployments and has always caused more problems than it has solved.

Part of the issue is the way various client adapters interact with the wireless network is the job of the drivers/adapter/OS.     

Many client adapters that are 5/2.4 will stick on 2.4 even if their adapters are set to prefer 5 -- for various reasons.

Bottom line - you shouldn't be designing for 2.4 anymore,  design for 5 - turn on 2.4 if REQUIRED, and for those devices, have a different SSID.   Dual band SSID's don't work overly well on any Wireless solution IMHO. 

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@cantechit wrote:

 I have to agree 250% - Band Steering has never worked for my deployments and has always caused more problems than it has solved.

Part of the issue is the way various client adapters interact with the wireless network is the job of the drivers/adapter/OS.     

Many client adapters that are 5/2.4 will stick on 2.4 even if their adapters are set to prefer 5 -- for various reasons.

Bottom line - you shouldn't be designing for 2.4 anymore,  design for 5 - turn on 2.4 if REQUIRED, and for those devices, have a different SSID.   Dual band SSID's don't work overly well on any Wireless solution IMHO. 

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[MRCUR]

We use band steering on all of our SSID's without any (known) problems. I would highly recommend moving to a 25.X release though as the 25 branch brings a lot of nice stuff like AP client load balancing. We're currently using 25.3 without any (known) issues and it sounds like many others are using 25.5 successfully as well (we had an issue with SSID's not broadcasting with 25.5 on MR33's).