[Solved] School District WiFi issues - Calling Experts!

So I have a large building made of thick concrete walls. The building is mainly 1 long hallway with classrooms on either side. I did a quick site survey and came to the approximate location needed for each AP to penetrate each room.

I purchased (8) Engenius EAP-9550 APs and (4) TrendNet PoE switches. I ran (3) cables from a single room to the (3) APs on that side of the building (PoE). I sequentially alternated from channels 1-6-11 to avoid crosstalk and named each AP the same. Here is a diagram of the final layout

FINAL LAYOUT

PROB 1) When I try to connect with my phone, laptop, "tech cart", etc, the connection is seen at full strength, but soon after I connect it suddenly goes from great signal to crap. What actually is happening is the device is hopping to another AP down the hallway. WTF. Rather than connect to the strong convienent access point outside the door, it connects to the one down the hallway. They all have the same SSID. I know I can change the preferred order based on MAC, but these are roaming devices and that doesn't work.

PROB 2) I tried renaming all the APs to different SSIDs and the same thing occurs, it decides to hop to a different AP, usually weaker. I've tried different channels, different client devices, etc.

PROB 3) I said, hell with it, and decided to make 1 AP on either side the root and the other 2 APs around it repeaters. This would eliminate the hopping ideally. As soon as I changed 1 AP to a repeater.....EVERY PC in the building popped up an IP conflict error in XP. Is this a bridge loop issue?

ANY help or opinion on this issue would be great! Thanks!

Im not an expert just a student tech at university. but we ran into a similar problem with connections in older heavy bomb shelter style buildings. my guess is even though your Access points are able to penetrate the wall(whatever else) your Phone,laptop and other devices don't have the power to. so even though you can hear the AP loud and clear it cant hear you.

you can test this by taking your laptop into the ceiling or wherever you have direct sight to AP. if that is your problem you either have to move the APs' or set up repeaters to broadcast the weak Laptop, phone signals to APs'. so you would probably need some kind of repeater/brige to AP hybrid thing otherwise your just wasting bandwidth. but im sure someones done something like that on here.

Good Luck!

Best answer selected by cpujunky.

Glad to hear that your issue has been resolved and i apologise for hijacking your thread to ask a sideways question. May i ask why you used a PoE switch rather than a standard switch? Do you have to? What are the advantages of doing so?

Thanking in advanced,

Steve

Thanks for the prompt reply, certainly cleared things up for me. Also working for schools i have been considering wireless solutions. Did you follow a online guide regarding 'site surveying' or was that prior knowledge?

Again thanks for the help.

Superb, i have been using the Wifi Analyzer app in schools for a while now but never thought of its use from that direction. I will give this a go shortly.

Thanks for all the help!