I just bought cAP ac for my home wifi. I decided to pair it with my hEX S and build my home network using CAPSMan. But I have some problems with my setup. My laptop never connects to the cap with full 802.11ac speeds supported by it, which is 866.7 mbps. I wonder why my laptop always use 20mhz channel width instead of 80 or even 40. Meanwhile, my samsung smart tv always connects at 40 mhz all the time, even though the signal is lower as you see in the picture. My phone also rarely connects at 80mhz, which my phone supports. How can I increase the negotiated speed so my devices can take full advantage of 802.11ac ? I have NAS on my home but I only get around 12 MBps because of this.
At some point I caught my phone connect with 80 mhz width. But this rarely happen. Most of the time it only use 20 mhz channel width.
Here is what chipset my devices at home use:
My laptop is Dell G7 with Intel Wireless-AC 9560. It supports dual-chain 802.11ac up to 160 MHz channel width (max speed 1.7 gbps)
My phone is Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 with Snapdragon 636 SOC. It supports single-chain 802.11ac up to 80 MHz channel width (max speed 433 mbps)
My Samsung Smart TV. I don’t know the wifi chip used, but I believe it only supports dual chain 5GHz 802.11n up to 40 MHz width.
I’ve been where you are…after tweaks I have the following results on my CAP AC:
CAPSMAN forwarding - max 150Mbps
LOCAL forwarding - max 300 Mbps no matter what client I have or what I configure
If you read all the forum you will see that the CAP AC cannot go beyond 300-350 Mbps no matter the settings. Forget statistics on paper.
When you do capsman forwarding (aka all traffic goes to capsman) the throughput is heavily impacted even though the CPU of the machine that runs capsman is not very used. I guess it’s something on how it is implemented.
Why do you need capsman if you have a single AP?
Switch to local forwarding, it’s just a tick in the capsman config.
What morons think they are going to get marketing BS speeds.
867 is the theoretical TX of two way traffic.
Everyone discusses one way, as in downloads etc…
So please consider that as a starting point for discussion, its 867/2- propogation losses.
Using the MTUNA certifed 1/3 rule, one should expect out of a capac = 290 speeds give or take.
Remember this assumes LOS and no walls.
The other issue noted is that it is impossible to tune for a range of devices, if you have older devices you need older wifi which gets in the way of isolating the AP for newer high speed devices.
Further if older devices are being used, the wifi is slowed significantly for all users.
Finally we haven;t discussed interference (besides walls), and this ranges from electrical wiring, appliances and other wifi eminating devices in the house or from neighours houses/apts.
Great explanation! I spent countless hours to figure out every parameters MT offers to change, studied it more than study my woman, I finally understand and accepted the Wi-Fi performance of MT is actually what Wi-Fi should be, any higher performance offer by other vendors are just gimmick of marketing!! Love MT for everything!!
But how am I going to answer my wife when she ask me that why those TP-Link, Asus, Netgear, Ubiquiti, Xiaomi, Huawei, Linksys, Aruba, Ruckus, D-Link, Aztech, Buffalo… are actually perform better in WiFi with or without fine tune? Please help, I got so much WiFi knowledge after learning MT but I just can’t answer it, how? She only look at the result, if the result is bad then how to answer?? Need help urgently, please
All those vendors use the WiFi driver provided by the chipset maker (e.g. Qualcomm and Broadcom) and implement their software around it, on the other hand Mikrotik develops its own drivers which are not able of fully utilizing newer ARM hardware (e.g. no MU-MIMO or beamforming).
Most has been said already and is excellent advice. So to second it and add some more …
don’t use other older encoding, it will slow you down. A/n/ac should be ac, if needed then n/ac can be used but you will loose 10% in overhead
-always pick your channel yourselves, never “auto” that selection. Do that based on an environment check (freq usage, AP scan, snooper).
-double check your channel selection and device positions by comparing “hw packets” versus “packets”. Just check if there are retransmits. The averaged outcome is also in the TX/RX CCQ column.
low CCQ will bring you down from the max MCS speed. (443Mbps for 40 MHz, 876Mbps for 80 MHz … interface data rate)
low CCQ has to do with reflections, diffraction, distortion, absorption, interference … etc. The fact that you only get 270Mbps with 40MHz/2S/SGI means that there are issues with this
data rate in one direction is about 50% of the interface data rate, it’s again less than 1/2 of that if bidirectional
CapsMan with non-local offloading will slow you down somewhat
in the settings, “ac” does not use HT MCS but the few lines of VHT MCS (there are less options in “ac” than in “n” with HT MCS rates !)
if you have 3 radio’s, like in your config, then there should be 3 times a VHT MCS entry in the GUI : supported VHT MCS 0-9 , basic can be VHT MCS 0-7. If set to “none” that radio will not be used. (Set Data Rates on configured, not default, to see the VHT MCS in the GUI)
I leave the MCS information as default. Just for checking I set it on configured. (One image in this thread showed "MCS 0-9/MCS 0-9/none")
The old play with removing lower MCS rates in the supported range is gone. (There is no space in the "ac" beacon packet for that information). A good thing. It made as much sense as removing the lower gear ratio's from your car. You do not want to be in those lower MCS rates (or lower gear) unless when momentarily needed. The alternative for lower MCS rates is losing connection.
How to get rid of those "slow movers on the highway"? They are consuming a lot of airtime. Mkt has no "airtime fairness" algoritm, so their impact is enormous. We have to do it with the received signal strength in the access-list rules. Not perfect. I have no cure for that one device that connects with -62dBm and a TX/RX CCQ of 6% (beacuse of wall's and other things in the path / MCS rate is low because of the many re-transmits / airtime consumption is even higher / throughput is CCQ * 50% of MCS interface data rate)
I just have no idea with n/ac how MKT combines HT and VHT MCS rates, and if it still uses the a/g rates or not. (MCS 0 =+- 6 Mbps)
