3COM wireless problem

As anyone ever come accross this problem b4 ?

We have a wireless network using a number of 3COM Officeconnect Wireless 11a/b/g access points, we also have a number of the same 3COM Officeconnect Wireless b/g access points.
The problem we are having is, if we log on to the a/b/g access points and then later try to log on to the b/g access points, we lose the connection and have to reconnect to the network.

I should point out that this is a school network and the children are logging on at different times and in different rooms, so this is a big headache.

Hope someone can help

Is the SSID the same accross all access points? What type of wireless security are you using?

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Jeremy

Marlborough WiFi Project

Yes the SSID is the same accross all Access Points.

We are using WPA encryption with a pre shared key which is all setup ok

Hi there.
By lose the connection I am assuming you mean wireless connection? Have you got your AP's set up with good channel separation between 1,6 and 11 in places where you won't get too much overlap? Can be issues with clients trying to hold onto wrong signal if too much overlapping of AP's using same channels.

All the best
Dale

Am I right in thinking that say I have 2 rooms next to each other and 1 access point is using channel 1 the next classroom should be using any channel above 6?

Yes you need to have at least 6 channel separation to get good performance, if they are within range of each other.

Dale

I suspect if your client computers are dual-band (a/b/g) they are connecting to the dual-band APs on the 5GHz band so they have to reconnect when associating to 2.4GHz-only gear.

Try forcing your clients or APs to use 2.4GHz only as it is unlikely to slow them down, and you can't enjoy speed without reliability. Perhaps a driver/firmware update might resolve this as well?

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Jeremy

Marlborough WiFi Project

The story so far.
I set the APs to only accept 11g this worked fine no problem until I decided in my wisdom to change the channel on one of the APs was using. I changed it from "Clear Channel Select" to use channel 11, restarted the AP to find no client could connect.

So reset AP back to factory setting and then configured it again exactly how we had it setup in the first place.
Clients still could not connect so took off encryption, bingo clients could now connect.
Set encryption back to our original settings and now everything seems to be working fine, but am still no wiser as to why this happened.

Any Ideas?

Thanks to gowifi And NZLamb for all your Help.