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So, it looks like the iPad may not have had the enterprise in mind at first glance.  Has any one had a chance to verify the connectivity woes that some users appear to be experiencing before I begin assigning a seperate SSID for each radio in each AP.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3304

So what wireless LAN product does Apple have at their offices?

There are more reasons for assigning different SSIDs for 2.4GHz vs 5GHz radios, other than for iPads.

One simple technique that uses human nature to 'self-regulate' loads on your Wireless Networks is to use different SSIDs for your frequency bands.

Say, 'Corp' for your 2.4GHz SSID and then for your 5GHz SSID use 'Corp-Fast'. You'll be amazed how fast your own users figure this out and those who can, will move off 2.4GHz and over to the 5GHz band. Each user that does this frees up a little more capacity in the over-crowded 2.4GHz frequencies, *and* gets themselves a much faster connection with fewer devices to share the bandwidth as well as far less co-channel interference.

Think of it as "poor-man's band-steering" - it really works!

Keith

Keith@wlanpros.com

http://wirelesslanprofessionals.com

That's an interesting technique Keith. I never thought of trying that! BTW Apple uses Aruba. :-)

I wonder if the problem is just a software issue. I have a couple of iPad users here on a network I am configuring with Aruba right now and they are not reporting issues (yet).

So, is the issue really only with split mac? I like the idea of having seperate 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz radios, but with medical devices your at the mercy of the vendors' ability to think ahead.  Then you have a phone vendor that has best practices to use UNII-1 & UNII-3 only which basically nukes your 40MHz wide channels anyway. When an $250,000 medical device has a $50 consumer wireless nic with a custom linux driver that doesn't support WMM you change you mindset to less is more. So, LESS wireless features is MORE sleep at night to be precise.  I think in the future similar to 802.11b many of these problems will disappear as the ROC's no longer come in 802.11a/b/g only but rather support a/b/g/n and we no longer are worried about our 40MHz channels because we are working out the new issues with 802.11ad <- =).  Ok, I'll get off my soap box in a minute because I have another question but it doesn't belong here.  Thanks for the response Keith, that is a great point.

From the tear-down pictures I have seen, it is very hard to tell exactly what kind of antennas are in the IPAD.   The one looks like it might be a PIFA antenna, but I can't tell for sure.

From my experience with small antennas, the cable routing is extremely important.   It doesn't look like the deisgn would allow for much variation, if any, in this respect.   So I would expect performance from one I-Pad to the next, with the same radio, to be very similar.  Of course, that assumes that the antennas, and radio card PCBA's, all use the same PC board stack-up.

Does anyone know the advertised rates, and sensitivities, for the Ipad?

I haven't seen too many "g" implementations with only 6, 12, and 24 Mbps being available, but that is all that is required by the spec.    I could imagine connection difficulties if some WLAN Administrator got carried away dissallowing some rates that he should have just left alone.

I checked out that post in Apple's KB.  I realize I'm about to offend some Apple fans, but I can't help myself.

With a handful of Macs and several iPhones in my network, I've seen several issues that required searching Apple's KB.  More often than not, it seems the solution translates to "our new product is fine, it's your infrastructure that works fine with everything else that's busted."

Personal opinion, no more, no less.

What?

A vendor is blaming other vendors for your problem? - It is soooo sad that Apple is out there alone... the sole vendor that is blaming someone else. Boo hoo...

Troubleshooting 101: Hold all things constant and change only one item.

From a vendor's standpoint, they test, and re-test, and then test again their devices in some sample lab environment. Trying to replicate a 'normal' infrastructure. They have hundreds if not thousands of hours testing their devices. So it is a natural tendancy after seeing with your own eyes, your own devices working properly, to want to blame the infrastructure.

I've seen this first hand with AirMagnet products. On a fresh baseline machine loaded with just Windows OS, AirMagnet products are rock stable. But then sometime in class folks load the exact same version I have (off of my USB sticks) with my own Wireless NICs, with my licenses, with the same rev of OS i have. The only 'not constant' is the other software they have running.

I know it's not a good excuse. But that's just how the world is sometimes.

Perhaps we could all put some pressure on the Wi-Fi Alilance to do a more stringent testing procedure to *really* test clients and access points - not the wimpy little tests they do now that allow for all these differences to still sneak through so we have troubleshooting work.

Keith

keith@wlanpros.com

http://wirelesslanprofessionals.com

The University of New Hampshire - Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL)  is not only a WFA PRE-Certification laboratory, they also have a whole suite of tests they perform for non-WFA members.   I think these would be a good start - not only for the WFA, but all infrastructure devcie manufacturers.

Take a look at the list of tests they have:

http://www.iol.unh.edu/services/testing/wireless/testsuites/

For WFA members, the full certification tests can be done at any one of the dozen or more WFA authorized test labs around the world.   Of course, this is an additional expense to the yearly WFA membership fee.  

One of the benefits of membership is a copy of the WFA tests descriptions.   If your not a member, you can't see what the certification tests actually entail.  This makes it very difficult to tell what they are testing, other than basic compatibility.

Heck, you can't even get a list of the infrastructure devices in the WFA Test Bed.    And it's a more obscure than you might first guess.

Dot11 is only one of the many UNH-IOL test domains.   They also test multi-gigabit Ethernet, Fiber Optic, and others.

Typical Apple! These guys have no clue!!! When I had the opportunity to work with these guys on their 14^th street store I had the ability to converse with other subs on site. The 2 things that stick in my mind are that union labor would work on Sundays to install a WLAN: not!!! and the other is that the masons had to move a wall 3 times to incorporate the glass staircase! Not a picture of typical corporate America, just a snapshot of Apple being Apple, and IMHO just sucks!!! Their motto: “just throw money at it!!!”

btw these guys still call every few months asking me to take a net engineer’s job.

Most iPad users reported that Wi-Fi connectivity error occur. If you have a Wi-Fi connectivity for ipad. You should verify that your Wi-Fi router firmware is up-to-date. You can also follow some troubleshooting tips for wireless connectivity on ipad by searching on Google.

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