With more devices and companies moving their data to the cloud or shifting to wireless networks, the dependency on available reliable Wi-Fi has increased. Additionally, more and more places are adapting smart technology and IoT- all of which require a stable and reliable connection to Wi-Fi. It is no secret that the internet is an integral part of our lives today and has enabled us to become more competent in our jobs and studies.
Through my years of visiting websites, I’ve noticed that people essentially need two things to maintain a stable and reliable Wi-Fi connection: capable hardware and good network design. The latter is more important than people might expect since the design determines the efficiency of utilising hardware. So, one of the most important things here is access points (APs). Access points are devices that create a wireless local area network and are a crucial factor when designing a network. These devices are built to deliver purpose-driven networks that perform in our increasingly internet-demanding environments.
Proper design of access points (APs)
Contrary to what most people think, adding more APs can cause more harm than good to the network by interfering with each other. This is a common issue in cases such as schools and workplaces. Nonetheless, the ideal way to solve this is through a proper design that properly places APs throughout the building. This can be done via a WLAN software that designs and builds a predictive survey.
Separating VLANs
Since Wi-Fi is a shared medium, it isn’t surprising that a network or subnet with many devices connected to it can have slow Wi-Fi across it –especially if both the wired and wireless networks are on the same network. This will lead broadcast packets to take up more airtime on the shared medium, which isn’t something users care about.
The solution to this would be make new VLANs with exclusively wireless traffic coming into it. And so, devices can broadcast information and keep it contained within that specific VLAN.
Better Rates for Modulation Coding Schemes (MCS)
APs often need to communicate with more than one client, who are spread across numerous packets. In cases where the packets are situated far from each other, access points are forced to use a much slower data rate to restrict the amount of data lost in transmission – via a modulation coding scheme (MCS). Adjusting MCS rates will alleviate the issue here, allowing for a fast, reliable internet connection. Ensuring optimal MCS rates throughout the building starts with having the fewest number of APs required to achieve this MCS rate.
Limiting Overhead To Increase Airtime
One of the key indices in assessing Wi-Fi connections is through airtime utilisation. With a high overhead, clients have less available airtime that can service them. Some of the more common things that cause this include too many Service Set Identifiers (SSIDs) and slow broadcast traffic. For SSIDs, it can be easily solved by using a careful and proper design that can have three SSIDs:
- For client devices that typically uses dynamic VLANs
- For headless devices that can’t connect to the first SSID
- For guest traffic
Broadcast traffic, sent at the lowest possible data rate, limits client devices by making them wait for it before anything else. Therefore, it is a good idea to raise the basic service set or BSS minrate – the slowest connection speed that the APs will allow a client to connect. The goal here should be to get airtime utilisation below ten percent when no one is using the network.
A properly designed network should have high quality, converged and smart Access points running on top of future-proof multi-gigabit switches, with all network components orchestrated from a single pane of glass. With the proper design and planning tools, Wi-Fi problems will become a thing of the past.
