Engagement · Education / K-12 · Lower Manhattan, NY
The Lang School. Two floors, seventeen radios.
On-site UniFi WiFi troubleshooting at 26 Broadway. The reported symptom was instability and poor wireless performance across the school. Findings: an over-dense AP footprint with five radios disconnecting on a loop. Stabilized in a single visit, with a clear picture of what was wrong and what we changed.
- Client
- The Lang School
- Sector
- Education / K-12
- Location
- 26 Broadway, Suite 900, New York, NY 10004
- Engagement
- UniFi WiFi diagnostic + optimization
- Performed by
- ShiftCTRL
Stabilize first. Optimize after.
The objective of this visit was to assess, stabilize, and optimize the existing UniFi wireless environment based on reported WiFi instability and poor wireless performance across both floors of the school.
One visit. The full pass.
- Reviewed the UniFi network topology, wireless settings, logs, and the physical and virtual environment end-to-end.
- Performed multiple on-site walkthroughs across both floors, assessing signal behavior, roaming, latency, throughput, and real-world client performance.
- Reviewed the rack, cabling, and installed network hardware.
- Created a backup of the UniFi OS / control-plane configuration and uploaded it to the client’s designated Google Drive.
- Isolated the five faulty access points driving the wireless instability. One was disabled cleanly through the UniFi controller; the other four were oscillating faster than controller policy could converge, so a software disable would not have been deterministic — they were decommissioned at the switch-port level instead, which guarantees the radio is off and keeps the management plane authoritative. All five were tagged for RMA evaluation.
- Performed limited wireless optimization — reducing transmit power on select APs to relieve overlap and contention.
- Re-tested the environment via log review and an additional walkthrough. Confirmed improved wireless stability and better client behavior following the changes.
Density first, organization second.
Over-dense AP footprintPRIMARY
A total of 17 access points were visible in the UniFi controller. The active AP footprint appeared excessive for the size and layout of the space, creating overlap, contention, and unnecessary RF complexity.
Five APs in a disconnect / reconnect loopPRIMARY
Five access points were oscillating in a hardware-failure disconnect / reconnect cycle. The flap rate exceeded the window required for controller-driven configuration to apply cleanly, so four were decommissioned at the switch port — a deterministic isolation where a software disable would not have been — and tagged for RMA.
Mixed-vendor switching limits visibilitySTRUCTURAL
The network includes EdgeSwitch hardware alongside a UniFi switch and a UniFi gateway. The mix limits unified visibility and management through the UniFi control plane.
Disorganized rack and cabling
The rack and cabling environment was disorganized, with cables needing repatching and labeling. Additional labeling of cables and network-connected devices would make future troubleshooting and support significantly easier.
What we’d do next.
A second optimization pass.
- Additional AP right-sizing
- Further radio / channel / transmit-power tuning
- Review of AP placement strategy
- Validation under normal occupancy conditions
Hardware standardization.
Bring more of the switching environment into the UniFi ecosystem where appropriate. Improves visibility, troubleshooting, centralized management, and control-plane consistency.
Repatch and label.
Clean up the rack, repatch with intent, and label both cables and devices. Improves serviceability, troubleshooting speed, documentation clarity, and long-term reliability.
Failover and recovery planning.
If higher uptime is important for school operations, evaluate a more resilient design: internet failover, gateway redundancy, more resilient switch design, and better-defined recovery / backup procedures.
Stabilized in one visit.
The wireless plane was stabilized in a single visit. Faulty radios were isolated where they would have continued to destabilize the controller’s view of the network, and transmit power was re-tuned on the surviving APs to relieve the co-channel interference left behind by the over-dense footprint.
We left the school with a clear picture of what was wrong, what we changed, and what to do next — so the next person to touch the network isn’t starting from zero.