[vox-tech] Nursing home wi-fi mystery

[Bill Broadley]

On 05/06/2015 10:05 AM, Rod Roark wrote:
> Here's a puzzle for you experienced network administrators.
> 
> 1. They only happen during the day when lots of staff or visitors are
> around.  The exception is shortly before midnight every night, which I
> figure is by design.
> 
> 2. They occur at random times, about 6 times per day.  Thus clearly not
> an intentional timeout.

My guess is the connection state table is getting full.  Sadly in the
race to the bottom often corners are cut on ram, and it's been getting
worse with changes in user activity.  More network aware apps like
skype, hangouts, etc.  Checking in for virus rules, patches/updates,
more tabs open, live web pages that check in for updates, etc. etc.  So
for a given number of clients you need a larger connection table than
you needed years ago.  Not to mention smart phones, tablets, even smart
watches are more common, so the number of clients per person has been
increasing as well.

My guess is they have either a more heavily used router, or one with
less ram and you pinned your connection to the better router and no
longer have as many problems.

> (b) Access point malfunction under heavy use.

Very common, normally I buy the access point/router with double the ram
for another $10.  Seems to make a huge difference in reliability.
Despite heavy use my current wifi router has been up 57 days, typically
it's up till the next power outage.  Despite heavy use by tablets, 2
desktops, 3 phones, etc.  We hit the network pretty hard around here
with plenty of video conferences, minecraft, roku, netflix, amazon
prime, etc.