Audience and HAP ac2 Wifi tune

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Hello People,

Need some advises, how to set my Audience antennas in our environment. Could you give some advises?

I have 2 audience in our place in 2 rooms, the rooms are separated with wall, and windows.

(AP1 small room - lounge, AP2 large room - office, center, HAP AC2 meeting room)

Wifi is CAP-ed, all the audience antennas (2G, 5G low and 5G high frequencies are in use. I have 2 fix clients, i want to fix them to one of the audiences and want smooth rooming for the other cca 20-40 clients to them. The configuration used on antennas set in Wifi/wifi tab.

The channel setup is same for all the AP’s, the frequencies are fixed, all the chanells are 20/40 wide. (on 5Ghz with CE) width settings.

For the 2 fix clients i have made an acl entry, that binds the client to the wanted AP-s wanted 2GHz interface (ACL1 and ACL2 entry as client MAC to AP1), and i made an acl (ACL3) that accepts all the other clients with signal strength is bethween for example -69..120 (any client to any interface)

In my case i see the fix clients with bethween -50 -60 signal level binded to the wanted AP’s. (AP2)

My problem is that all the other clients (5G capable) will connect first to the AP2 (entry point is nearer to that AP), but regarding the wandering of the devices/people, who are standing more closer to the AP1 will be better to connect to that AP.

If i monitor the registration table, i still see, that the devices are connected to AP2, regarding that the people are much nearer to AP1. (Signal level arround -75 or less)

Could someone give me some clues and approach how could be these configuration more sophisticated. Any rtm and docu is also welcomed!

(And sorry for my bad english)

Thank you for any hely in advance, best regards,
Ferenc

2

Client devices support a wide variety of wifi features, but in my limited experience it can be almost impossible to get a client to select a particular AP. It is possible to manage that with some of the more expensive systems that have proprietary methods, but it doesn’t always work seamlessly for the clients.

In your case since you have a fairly straightforward scenario and an Audience, I would simply assign an SSID and one radio to the two fixed clients and allow the other clients to roam as needed on the other radios. If you anticipated other changes being necessary in the future I might go ahead and create some additional SSIDs to group the clients so that moving them to other hardware in the future would be as simple and adding a new AP and moving the SSID to that AP.

I’d also take care to test and monitor power levels and channels on the different radios to make sure I encouraged the best associations between devices and APs. Some clients will cooperate well and some won’t, but you can try to present the best options possible where you can.

Hopefully that simple solution would work well for you. If not, then I’m afraid you may be fighting a losing battle. Of course you could always just throw in another cheap AP for the two special machines and solve the issue that way, but I think just using one Audience radio should suffice.

3

What band/frequency have you defined per AP?
Do you use Extension Channel on 2.4 GHz?

IMHO limiting the signal range via ACL confuses the clients more than it helps.
I’d recommend using Basic Rate 24 Mbps and Supported Rates 36, 48 and 56 Mbps instead.

4

@junkertf : which wireless/wifi package is installed on your devices? I’ll assume it’s wireless since all come with it installed from factory. And that driver doesn’t really do anything to help with client roaming/mobility.

You may want to replace wireless with wifi-qcom-ac (available in ROS 7.13 and newer) … it’s newer generation and adds mobility functions (including delayed responses from 2.4GHz interfaces to encourage clients to connect to 5GHz interfaces … this one was introduced in 7.18). Works great on Audience. Gotcha: although it’s possible to install it on hAP ac2, this devices has a tiny 16MB flash and installing wifi-qcom-ac can lead to flash space starvation (and consequently random problems).

1 Like
5

@mkx
Now wifi-qcom-ac package exists on every of the devices…
The Hap AC2 is my smallest question, the bigger is with the audience :slight_smile:

6

Now i use 2452 with 20/40 (no CE)
Actually the 2GHz N is used regarding the compatibility for the old devices (present in 1-5 pcs)

Regarding the other question, how it is possible to use such Rate-limit, that dont disturb, the devices in use of online streaming? I could not be sure, when what device would make these streaming, and want a guarranteed bandwith for the devices…

7

My audience adores wifi-qcom-ac … ever since it became available as wifiwave2 package back in 7.0 beta times.

8

Are you using the same channel (2452) on all three APs?

It’s about Minimum Data Rate - not Rate Limit. But since you’re using wifi-qcom-ac it’s not available anyway.

10

Yes, as i wroted in the open senteces, the Wifi is CAP-ed, so i use 1 configration for the 2,4Ghz channels, what is 2452

11

Hmm. If every AP is using the same channel/frequency (2452) your clients might have a hard time to (re-)connect.

I’d suggest you use i.e. 2412 (AP1), 2437 (AP2) and 2462 (hAP ac2) instead. Also limit the Channel Width to 20 MHz only.