36
5.3 Band Steering
There are clients that only support the 2.4GHz band and clients that support dual band in a
wireless network. If all the clients connect to the 2.4GHz band, the 2.4GHz band will become
very congested, reducing the network performance. With band steering enabled, the AP
would steer the dual band clients to connect to the 5GHz first, which would balance the
band connections and improve the network performance. When enabling band steering,
please ensure the SSIDs of both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands are the same.
The following example is used to illustrate the process of band steering.
Figure 5-4
Band Steering Process
Dual-band CAP
Wireless Controller
Dual-band Client
2.4GHz SSID: TP-Link
Client Number: 36
5GHz SSID: TP-Link
Client Number: 40
The 2.4GHz SSID and 5GHz SSID of the dual-band CAP are set the same. If a 2.4GHz client
or 5GHz client requests to connect to the CAP, the band steering won’t take effect and the
client will connect to the 2.4GHz or 5GHz directly. If a dual band client requests to connect
to the CAP, due to band steering, the CAP will lead the client to connect to the 5GHz band
first.
When the wireless network satisfies the following two conditions:
1 The client number of the 5GHz band reaches or exceeds the maximum client numbers
that are allowed to connect (40 as an example).
2 The difference value in client number of the 2.4GHz band and the 5GHz band
reaches or exceeds the difference threshold set in band steering setting (4 as an
example,40-36≥4)
.
Due to band steering, a new dual band client will be rejected from connecting to the 5GHz
band and be allowed to connect to the 2.4GHz band.
