Instant On - Wireless

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  • 1.  Mesh of 11Ds picking the worst channel?

    Posted 12-19-2020 10:23 PM

    Hi everyone,

    I have 3 x 11ds with one wired to the internet router and the other two doing wireless backhaul/Mesh off that one (wiring my 120 year old double brick house for Ethernet is prohibitive and the Mesh seems to meet my needs). I am in an inner-city area that I'd call medium density ( row/terrace houses where we all share walls with neighbors on both sides) and I can see a heap of other wireless networks - mainly the 2.4Ghz stuff but also quite a bit of 5. If I run inSSIDer on my laptop it is clear that channel 36 is busy with two other networks using it near me with strong signals. On 149 I can see 3. I can't see anything on any of the other 5Ghz channels.

    What is strange is that the network keeps picking channel 36 even after rebooting the whole network (I have tried turning them all off then bringing up the wired one then the mesh etc.). Finally I went in and unticked that and 149 as available options and then it picked 52 and things seem to work better re consistent latency/performance now etc.

    So I guess my question is that I assumed that somebody like Aruba would have really good Adaptive Radio Management (ARM) that would both pick the best channel on reboot and also be looking for changing environments and moving to better channels as things change - that it would do a better job of channel selection than me! Is it that once you have Mesh backhaul it won't move channels because it is too disruptive to the whole network? Am I missing something (there is interference it is seeing that I don't in inSSIDer or something)?



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  • 2.  RE: Mesh of 11Ds picking the worst channel?

    Posted 12-22-2020 06:44 PM

    It should be picking a channel that is least congested when forming the mesh. And typically will not change as it is disruptive to the mesh and clients. If this continues, please open a ticket to have them investigate.



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    Greg Thiesen
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  • 3.  RE: Mesh of 11Ds picking the worst channel?

    Posted 12-23-2020 05:51 PM

    My network is called LANDownUnder. By unticking 36 and 149 (though it never picked that one thankfully) it then is picking what I think is the right channel (52). Before today there was also nothing on 100 or 132 (one of the ones on 36 moved to 100 - so 36 was even worse when it was picking it). Unless I do that it always picked 36 on reboot - which as you can see seems less than ideal with what seems to be clearly better options. 

    It is not a big deal - just pointing out I had to do my own survey and then influence its decision to get to a good result channel-wise which is disappointing...



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    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Mesh of 11Ds picking the worst channel?

    Posted 01-03-2021 06:49 AM
    I too have noticed this as well and agree the auto radio management mechanism doesn't seem to work very well in the InstantOn platform.  AP channel selection is poor when you have multiple AP's that are within range of each other.  

    This feature works great in the enterprise Aruba Instant platform and it's called Aruba "Adaptive Radio Management (ARM)"

    Question for the InstantOn folks, is ARM the basis in the InstantOn code for radio management or something else?

    Original Message


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