Upgraded network causes wifi to stop working

[rl_albright]

Last year I upgraded the network in our building per the direction of my stake president (under the guidance of the FM group), adding network jacks in all large classrooms, and fixing the cabling nightmare that was present in our stake clerk's office (we had 15 network cables snaking out of the ceiling, it looked horrible).

Well this week, I went to install a gigabit switch for the main backend in the building, as I am being told that sometimes throughput is slow. However I put it in, the wired network comes up just perfectly, however the wireless "LDSAccess" network will not allow devices to obtain IP addresses through the gigabit switch. Has anyone else had that sort of problem? The access points fire right up, I can see them all, my cell phone and laptop can authenticate but they can not receive IP addresses.

This seems rather strange.

[russellhltn]

Are the APs connected to the gigabit switch? If the APs are the usual single-band G, there's no need for a connection faster than 100Mbps, so it may not be able to support that speed and it's having trouble negotiating the connection. Or, perhaps the wiring to them won't support that speed.

[harddrive]

Very good point Russell. I just checked at this link http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/do ... ap-faq.pdf, and it looks like the port speed of the AP unit is a maximum of 100 megabits/sec. So if the switch you bought is only for 1 gigabit and not 10/100/1000, then the AP units will not work.

[rl_albright]

The switch is for 10/100/1000, it has an indicator on the switch to visually tell me if the port is operating at gigabit, the access points are registering as gigabit on the switch for some reason.

[harddrive]

Ok, now the next question is it Cat5e cable or better?

[rl_albright]

Yes, CAT5e cabling. Funny thing is, I think it might be the switch that is malfunctioning. When I initially did the cabling, I installed a managed gigabit switch, but apparently it had a 50 user limit (??? I know right), which I discovered that following Sunday when everyone was trying to connect and couldn't. I had to drop it back to the 10/100 switch that was previously installed. But while it was on the gigabit switch there was no problems connecting to LDSAccess over it.

Any ideas that why this could be causing this?

[harddrive]

That is interesting. Who makes the switch? I have never heard of a 50 user limit, but it could be something in the firmware/OS on the switch.

[russellhltn]

The switch is for 10/100/1000, it has an indicator on the switch to visually tell me if the port is operating at gigabit, the access points are registering as gigabit on the switch for some reason.

Auto-negotiate can be an issue. That's why a number of switches allow you to manually set the port speed.

But first off, I'm wondering why the old switch isn't cutting it. How fast is your ISP? Or are you running a local server? Without a local resource, or a ISP connection in excess of 100Mbs, I'd say a 1 gig switch is overkill. I'm not sure as the firewall can even keep up with 100Mbs traffic.

[rl_albright]

The switch is for 10/100/1000, it has an indicator on the switch to visually tell me if the port is operating at gigabit, the access points are registering as gigabit on the switch for some reason.

Auto-negotiate can be an issue. That's why a number of switches allow you to manually set the port speed.

But first off, I'm wondering why the old switch isn't cutting it. How fast is your ISP? Or are you running a local server? Without a local resource, or a ISP connection in excess of 100Mbs, I'd say a 1 gig switch is overkill. I'm not sure as the firewall can even keep up with 100Mbs traffic.

I am not seeing any problems, but my stake president says things are timing out on him on Sundays over the wireless connection. No problems are present on the wired connections, so I was thinking that it was the switch bottlenecking all of the wifi connections, that is why I was upgrading to a gigabit switch.

There is no local server here.

[harddrive]

What is your connection speed to your ISP? How many users are using the WIFI on Sunday morning and what is the bandwidth usage at that time? I don't think it was the switch, I believe that it is the Internet connection and potential saturation of the ISP connection.