Certain clients won’t be able to handle these. So if you lose access (it’s been reported for Lenovo Windows machines for instance) then you need to turn them off.
You turn these on by going to the Unifi Controller Settings at the lower left and enabling Advanced Settings which include airtime fairness, bandsteering, minimum RSSI, and load balancing. Here is why they do
- Band Steering. Most clients are not super smart. If the 2.4GHz signal is stronger then they will connect even though it may have more interference. So you have to go to each AP, (or creat an AP group that sets for many APs) and choose Balanced. This means balance 2GHz and 5Ghz clients so they get the same bandwidth. If however you have lots of interference you also just choose prefer 5G and it will push everyone up there
- Airtime Fairness. This is hard to understand given the name. But what it means is that by default, every client gets the same data slice. So a really slow client that is 9x slower than a fast cooker would use 90% of the airtime. With airtime fairness on, every client gets an equal time slice. So in this case a slow client gets the same time but less data. In most cases, folks would want this one. This prevents cases where a very slow distant client can chew up all the bandwidth as essentially all clients data throughput drops to the slowest client. Note that this off by default with the AP nanoHD. I don’t know why.
- Load Balance. This is another confusing feature. Basically when you reach a maximum number of clients on an AP, the AP will send a disassociate to the client. Then client then searches for a new access point and reconnects. It is hard to find because it is actually set per SSID, so turn it on in the controller advanced gestures then go to the WiFi section and for each SSID turn it on. In most home situations you won’t really need this as a single AP can handle more than enough. There’s a hard coded limit of 128 clients per radio but realistically more than 30 is too much.
- RSSI Minimums. I don’t use this but means that the APs will only connect when there is enough signal. You use this in cases where you have overlap of APs and don’t want clients to connect to weak ones.
