So i’m setting up a very simple building coverage setup
hex POE —wired----> cAP lite x 2 setup
i’m using default configuration everywhere, it’s brand new setup.
i’m using CAPsMAN on the router, and cap mode on the AP.
the building isn’t that big, so the distance to AP is pretty small. but i’m seeing packet loss intermittently
i don’t see any packet loss pinging the ethernet side of the APs.
is this issue a hallmark of poor signal?
also when i use my wifi scanner, i see that both APs keep jumping frequencies, i think that’s a feature?
If wifi channel is clean, then AP won’t change frequency. Whenever AP changes frequency, clients will have to re-associate, making ping timeout highly probable. Ping times are rather high, in my setup with quite clean 2.4GHz all pings over wifi are between 8 and 9 ms.
When looking at wifi scanner, do you see many other APs on air?
Yeah there are quite a few. i’m not at location currently, but i can use winbox wifi scanner.
it’s not the best at visualizing it, but there are a lot of 2.4ghz APs detected by each APs.
i told the CAPsMAN to allow ch 2 6 11, and now they’re both on 11 (which i heard is another CAPsMAN problem)
but now the ping isn’t missing, just still high sometimes, ranges from 5ms to 169ms
i wonder if i should’ve gone with the more expensive AC so i can use the 5ghz. but not all of the devices can do 5ghz.
If there are more than one or two other APs using same channel (and the signal strength is say less than 20dB lower tgan your own AP’s), then you’ll get shitty service no matter what. One solution is to go for 5GHz, but you alrwady wrote that not all of wifi clients support it. Probably you should go dual-band with distinct SSIDs so that 5G capable devices will stick to it. And only configure 2.4G-only devices to use the noisy 2.4GHz spectrum
Another possibility is to fix frequency to one of channels (you can scan for least-occupied of channels 1-6-11) … at least wifi clients won’t get dropouts due to frequency changes. And try to set both cAPs to different channels.
Sounds like you did this all backwards. Bought equipment and the came here looking for help.
Always better to determine actual requirements before spending money and secondly for wifi, always do a site survey prior to purchasing as well.
just to provide closure to this thread, i end up just using 1 of the cap lite. the other one isn’t configured, but it’s there and i can join it to capsman remotely.
it’s a relatively cheap small size experiments.
i learn that the next wifi AP i get will have fast-roam features (i think a set of 3 or 4 802.11 protocols).
it’s ridiculous how good some of these “mesh” AP have gotten, supposedly.
