On permit day, a municipal licensing lobby fills with mixed phones, tablets, and a few legacy scanners that still associate at very low rates. Voice and tablet sessions stall while those slow clients stay associated. Which remediation best restores fairer airtime without abandoning capacity planning?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Picture a single checkout lane where one shopper pays with pennies—everyone else waits. Low-rate clients burn airtime the same way. Raising basic rates and steering capable devices to 5 GHz shrinks that airtime tax so permit-day density stays usable.
Full Explanation
In high-density mixed-client cells, airtime is the scarce resource: a station stuck at a low MCS occupies the medium far longer per byte than a modern dual-band client. Raising minimum/basic rates and using band steering (where clients support 5 GHz) reduces protection/legacy overhead and improves fairness. Simply cranking AP power or disabling WMM does not fix airtime unfairness and can worsen contention. Channel-width increases help peak rate only when reuse and SNR remain healthy—often false on a crowded permit-day floor.