Best Practices: Setting up a WiFi Connection on Webex Boards, Desk and Room Series Devices

Configuring a WiFi connection according to the best practices in this article will ensure a seamless meeting experience.

Your video and voice experience will be greatly enhanced by a stable internet connection whenever you use Webex Boards, Desks, and Room Series devices.

Wired network connections are recommended whenever possible because they provide greater stability. You can establish a more reliable and dedicated connection in the home by using a powerline ethernet adapter. You can, however, use a wireless connection instead of a wired connection if you cannot use a wired connection.

Important: Ensure that your WLAN equipment – such as access points and routers – is capable of handling and distributing the load among connected devices. Wireless networks have a limited bandwidth, so you’ll probably connect many devices to them.

This article describes the best practices that can be implemented on devices connected to a WiFi network so that they can improve two key metrics and thus improve the audio and video quality on those devices:

• Packet Loss Rate -As a result of the transmission of packets, a certain percentage of them are lost.

• Interarrival Jitter -As a measure of packet arrival times, it is the difference in milliseconds between packets received during the same period.

There are a couple of best practices that network administrators can follow when configuring WiFi networks to help ensure a seamless meeting experience:

• Avoid deploying access points from different manufacturers , as this can result in the radio spectrum getting crowded and contributing to the issue of congestion.

• Coverage of devices at 5 GHz should be prioritized. The 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz networks should have the same network name (SSID), so that 5 GHz should be prioritized if the two networks have the same name (SSID).

• There should be less than 50% utilization of wireless channels.

• During the configuration of 802.11d, create an element that adds a country information element to beacons, probe requests, as well as probe responses. It is recommended that you utilize the world safe channels 36, 40, 44, and 48 if your wireless equipment does not support this feature.

• It is recommended that you verify that the device can see the access point at a level of -60 dBm (as close to zero as possible).

• You will want to verify that you see the device at -60 dBm or better on an access point (the closer it is to zero, the better it is).

• As a rule of thumb, ‘Signal to Noise Ratio’ should be at least 25 decibels.

• Enable ‘Airtime fairness’ so that coexisting clients can get the same amount of airtime, regardless of where they are located.

• Enable Quality of Service (QoS) if it is available. Video devices tag with AF41, and voice devices tag with EF.

Some of the configurations in the list above may not be available in home office setups using equipment provided by an internet access provider.