I’ve only recently discovered MT after I found myself in the market for an AP. After reading so many compelling reasons for trying out MT devices, I decided to give the cAP ax a shot. I was thinking that an AP of this caliber would be more than enough for an average sized (3-room) apartment in a suburb. After trying it out for the last week or so, I cannot tell if I received a faulty device or my expectations were mistaken. To elaborate:
Sitting in the same room with the AP (kitchen/living room), I get an average signal of -45dbm on the 5Ghz band and -68dbm on the 2.4Ghz one. If I move to one of the bedrooms, I have a very weak signal, sometimes even losing connection. I compared its performance with my all-in-one router which is sitting in a cabinet in one of the rooms and I get similar signal strength in the living room which seems unreasonable to me.
I have tried a few different things so far, e.g. changing Tx power or antenna gain but they seem to be maxed out (applicable to country settings) by default anyways so I can only lower them basically. Another thing I’ve been wondering is if placement of such devices has to be strictly at the ceiling or they should perform well on e.g. a table, floor or wall. Any help or advice is appreciated.
Welcome to the world of (Mikrotik) wi-fi mysteries.
A cap Ax is designed to be mounted on a ceiling (though it is also possible to mount it vertically on a wall, though in this latter case it will likely perform worse).
The board is full of reports about the cap Ax being either very good or a terrible device, so we don’t really know.
There some settings/tweaks that may better the reception or speed, but not AFAIK a canonical guide on what should be done.
Welcome to the world of (Mikrotik) wi-fi mysteries.
Understatement of the day! So many posts of this nature (Mikrotik Wi-Fi 6/AX = poorer Wi-Fi than my old XYZ Wi-Fi 5 router) that it’s can’t all just be misconfiguration can it? Hence my post about antenna size and SA query timeouts etc. I’ve delayed switching to cAP ax due to this at client sites and still putting in good (!) old cAP ac.
Thank you both, it’s a little reassuring to see that I’m not alone in this. I wonder if anyone has reached out to support to try and get an official answer on why the controversy in experience between different consumers. I also wonder if attempting to install a beta version of ROS would yield any difference; a quick look on the change log didn’t indicate anything of that nature and I suspect that the problem might be hardware-related (I hope not tbh)
And I concur that the issues are unlikely to be connected to hardware (it is not like Mikrotik has own proprietary chips or circuits) and AFAICU now they are using not anymore their proprietary drivers but rather the chip manufacturers ones.