Instant On - Wireless

Dear Support Team,

We are a small company using Aruba Instant On APs to provide wireless network access for our employees and guests. Recently, we have encountered some performance issues with our wireless network and would appreciate your assistance. Below are the details of the setup and the issues we are facing. Thank you for your time in reviewing this.

1. Network Topology: Router → Switch → PoE Switch → APs
2. AP Models and Quantities: AP25 x 1, AP22 x 9, AP11 x 3. All APs are connected via wired uplinks with a speed of 1Gbps. The software version for all APs is 3.0.0.0.
3. Wireless Network Configuration: We have separate SSIDs for employees and guests. We are only using the 5GHz band and not the 2.4GHz band. Access control is not enabled. Wi-Fi 6, OFDMA, and multicast optimization are enabled in the wireless settings.

Network Performance Issues:
1. When the number of clients connected to a single AP22 exceeds 20, the average latency for all devices (various brands and models of smartphones and laptops) to reach the internal network gateway and internal NAS server exceeds 100ms, with peak latency exceeding 600ms.
2. The situation with the AP25 is slightly better, but latency increases significantly when the number of connected clients reaches 25-30. At this point, the AP shows around 65% utilization of the 5GHz radio.
3. The clients and the AP are located in the same meeting room with no physical obstructions.
4. The total traffic on the uplink to the AP is less than 100Mbps.

Questions:
The recommended number of clients for the AP25 is over 100, and for the AP22, it is 75. However, in practice, latency becomes very high with just 30 clients. Is there a mistake in our configuration? How should we troubleshoot and improve this situation?

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islandX
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I wanted to confirm similar issues after the 3.0.0 and 3.0.0.1 updates. While authentication errors improved with 3.0.0.1 there is clearly still something affecting network performance that needs another hotfix. Below is a sample ping test to the local network gateway from a client on a lightly used network with a single AP25, connected to the 5GHz network:

388 packets transmitted, 385 packets received, 0.8% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 2.734/179.833/1721.159/258.700 ms

I've done some diagnostics, and can confirm the following:

• There are no "new" neighbor APs or channel interference. We're the only station visible in the 80MHz window in use (channel 36).
• We do not have any new or unusual usage patterns. Total traffic on this AP was ~13GB in the last 24 hours. This telemetry also matches our firewall traffic logs. A client is not causing this.
• There are no new clients or other unique devices on the network.
• We have not otherwise altered the install environment or the upstream network, which remains directly wired to the site's primary switch.

For reference, before 3.x we saw consistently low latencies in the 2-7ms range. The lone change to this setup has been firmware 3.x. The AP25 is using 3.0.0.1, so the issue does NOT appear to be fixed in the latest configurations.