I've recently replaced our old consumer-grade NetGear access points with a SonicPoint Ne Access Point to work with our SonicWALL NSA 3500. The old NetGears kept kicking everyone off the network and required a power cycle to get the network up again.
I thought that dropping in something enterprise class might result in a more stable wireless experience. How wrong I was! Personally, my phone and laptop connect to the new SonicPoint with no problems. But the rest of the office have a range of different issues, from random disconnects, not being able to connect at all, being able to connect but not access anything on the network and so on.
The NSA is at the latest firmware level and it has upgraded the SonicPoint to the latest version.
Frame Aggregation is disabled
Short Guard Interval is disabled
Channel width is set to 20 MHz
Channel has been set manually since 'Auto' chose a very congested channel
RF analysis shows that the channel has low interference - rating of 10/10
I have opened a case with SonicWALL about this but they have as yet not given any advice above what I've already done.
We may require some more access points to support the number of clients that we have, but regardless of that the overall experience is worse than when we had a supposedly 'less able' consumer grade AP. Even with relatively few clients connected, we still see problems.
Any thoughts before I put it back in the box and return it?
Look at your switch - shut off spanning tree. Here is documentation on how to do that:
http://help.mysonicwall.com/sw/eng/7731/ui2/25500/PANEL_addWlanSonicPoint.html#1030856