Cybersecurity Forum

This forum is for all security enthusiasts to discuss Fortinet's latest & evolving technologies and to connect & network with peers in the cybersecurity hemisphere. Share and learn on a broad range of topics like best practices, use cases, integrations and more. For support specific questions/resources, please visit the Support Forum or the Knowledge Base.

LeifGunn
New Contributor

Chromebook and Fortinet wifi

Hi

Is there anyone out there who has chromebooks and Fortinet (Meru) wifi challenges?
We have some schools that have gone to the purchase of chromebooks instead of regular windows laptops. We are talking about classes with 30 students / chromebooks. They complain of instability because they lose the connection several times. We have 1 AP per classroom so basically it should be well covered. We have seen that chromebooks tend to jump between AP's and bands so we've increased baserates and lowered power and we only use the 5 ghz band. Nevertheless, we are still experiencing problems.
This was not a problem with windows laptops. Anybody who har experienced this and hopefully solved it?
FortiWLC 3000d 8.4.2
AP822
Virtual cell

Kind regards
Leif Gunnar Larsen

------------------------------
Leif Gunnar Larsen
Network Consultant
Bergen Kommune
Norway

[Phone]
------------------------------
2 REPLIES 2
jjmfns
New Contributor

I have found that in high densities of Chromebooks Virtual Cell does not perform well, even when the ESS profile is limited to the 5GHz radio. The current configuration utilized at most of our customers is Native Cell with ARRP enabled using 20 MHz channels, with the power lowered to 17 for a deployment that has an AP in every classroom (ARRP doesn't seem that aggressive with lowering power, but you should validate based on the building structure.)  Customers that are configured this way have very few (if any) complaints about Chromebook performance.

------------------------------
John [LastName] [Designation]
Data Engineer
[CompanyName]
[City] [State]
[Phone]
------------------------------
ShawPomf
New Contributor

Hi Leif

Did you make the power change noted below?  Just wondering how things are going.  We are also experiencing the same thing with the same one AP per classroom. 

FortiWLC   8.4-4build-8 | FortiWLC-3000D
822 and 832 AP
Native Cell