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We have a Cisco WLC2504 campus controller that serves our 19 access points across the organization. We're having a meetup this week with all of the technical staff. 70 people with their iphones, nexus 7's, ipads, all that good stuff.

Signal strength is fantastic, however latency is horrible and people occasionally get disconnected completely even though signal strength is showing excellent reception.

My gut instinct is that the Cisco 3602e access point that services the area where most of the people are housed is overloaded. I'm wondering if there's any particular error log entry on the AP itself or the WLC2504 that might indicate to me that the intermittent service is due to band overcrowding?

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    RE: "latency is horrible and people occasionally get disconnected completely even though signal strength is showing excellent reception", on both on 2.4G and 5G connections? Also, if you haven't already... you might want to quantify the conditions, such as client RSSI and the actual channel-utilization of your AP radios when the problems happen. I have seen APs that had such high channel-utilization from noise (even with one user) that my pings to the default gw took 40 seconds to return when I was only 50 feet from the AP (and had clear LOS to it). 70 users is a lot for one AP though.
    – Mike Pennington
    Oct 23, 2014 at 16:25
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    Also keep in mind that in the corporate world, you can expect a 2 device per person average. In an edu, this will often be somewhere in the 3-4 range. So, with 70 people, you can expect 140-280 devices even if many of them are largely inactive. For those numbers, you should have multiple access points.
    – YLearn
    Oct 24, 2014 at 1:38
  • It may unfortunately be too late to get good information about the nature of the issue since most of the people who were visiting this week are leaving in the morning. All the same, I've got some statistics collection going which so far indicates that we have a LOT of channel utilization at each of our offices, which might be a big part of the problem.
    – Peter Grace
    Oct 24, 2014 at 16:33
  • @PeterGrace, if you have Cisco NCS Prime, you might have some historical air quality information available. I don't have our NCS in front of me, but the docs indicate that the Air Quality Report should help
    – Mike Pennington
    Oct 24, 2014 at 23:22
  • Did any answer help you? If so, you should accept the answer so that the question doesn't keep popping up forever, looking for an answer. Alternatively, you can post and accept your own answer.
    – Ron Maupin ♦
    Jan 5, 2021 at 1:58

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It's the ap light weight pot autonomous? There should be logs in the wlc that could give you an indication. Keep in mind that every connected user shares the lowest connected speed of a client. Set your required speeds to a high enough setting and lower the power not to over saturate the area. Multiple aps also where needed.

We use 4aps in a lecture hall of about 100 students. No complaints from any of them.

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