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I got a complaint today from an end user whose internet was extremely slow only inside his office. Every other location in the building was fine, and the signal strength was very high even inside the affected office. I was thinking this had to be due to the AP being repositioned, or some physical change to the building, but when I set a static IP address in the AP and set it to 8.8.8.8, the end user instantly called me back to say it was fixed. It had previously been set to DHCP, with the router assigning its own IPs.

For the life of me I can't understand why this solved the problem. Why would only this one client's office be affected?

Setup is WAP > Switch > Router, the entire floor uses that same AP, and as mentioned the entire floor has very high signal strength, including the office with slow internet.

666adminpal
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    Signal strength itself does not mean much unless the [SNR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio) is known. Other than that, it could literally be anything, including a malfunction of your internal DNS server. Without network traces and a reproduction scenario it is impossible to tell what the cause might have been. – the-wabbit Sep 16 '15 at 18:54
  • So you configured the AP to have a static ip address and to use 8.8.8.8 for DNS? I have no idea why this would have any bearing on the client whatsoever. Are you saying that the AP is acting as a DHCP server for the clients and it is assigning 8.8.8.8 to the clients DNS? Additionally, are these clients joined to an Active Directory domain? – joeqwerty Sep 16 '15 at 20:52

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Sounds more like that one user was having IP issues compared to DNS. It might have be caused because he was sharing and IP with another computer, and while most of the time it's announced that he is sharing an IP, I have seen when it's not. When you forced the AP to static IP, you would have forced a reboot / soft reboot of the entire network with all new IP / connections. The refreshing of the connection might give you that better performance. Another aspect to look at is how many users were on that AP and how it was routed before. The signal strength in the end doesn't matter when it comes to DNS, that has to deal with how many lost packets there are. Since you can verify the signal strength then you know it has to deal with how its routing our how the DNS is communicating.

JustAGrump
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