The client has reported horribly slow Wi-Fi speeds. However, yesterday the speed was a reasonable 120Mbps although perplexed why it’s never getting anywhere near the full speed of the broadband considering all the components are rated 1Gbps. The installation was a bit of a rush as they gave very little notice.
Getting time onsite and time for diagnosing is difficult as it’s a bar open Mon-Sun 10am-midnight! I’m going to leave a spare laptop onsite so I can diagnosis it at my leisure but welcome any suggestions. I’ve deployed several Mikrotik routers but this is the first time I’ve dabbled with the cAP ACs.
Let’s start with the configuration, can you please share (at least one) config of the cAP ac? /export hide-sensitive file=anynameyoulike
What would also be intereseting is the connection speed of the clients.
Will do - going on-site later to install the laptop so I can generate the configuration. I’m also going to see if I can check the one thing I didn’t install - the cabling…
Client to client forwarding and local forwarding will speed things up considerably.
Also… A 2011? Why would you use a decade old router?
Moving on… Restaurants and Bars are the only thing one of my contractors does.
Meaning I have over 70 stores to call for reference on what works and what doesn’t.
The Mikrotik routers have no problems running those stores. But all the caps-man installs had to be removed.
Mikrotik wireless does not do well in noisy or crowded environments. Dropping some clients and not letting them reconnect. Or even having radios drop all traffic until restarted. Also the radios throughput is considerably lower than competitive products even under the best situations.
After months of fighting it and loosing a lot of clients… Mikrotik confirmed it was repeatable… And nothing could be done.
We had to give in and accept that Mikrotik wireless was stuck in 2014. And that while caps-man was great for management… The radios were not up to the task.
Went back to our old wireless vendor… All the trouble tickets stopped.
Had to replace cAP ACs and wAP ACs across the board… Residential and commercial. It was a very expensive lesson.
Also… A 2011? Why would you use a decade old router?
Because that isn’t advertised in front of you when ordering items. The price and specification was fine. But not first time this has happened - did with the same with Unifi AP which went EOL far too soon.
The Mikrotik routers have no problems running those stores. But all the caps-man installs had to be removed.
The router is fine - speed testing at 350Mbps which is the internet speed.
Mikrotik wireless does not do well in noisy or crowded environments.
I’m tempted to concur here - the 2.4GHz spectrum is horribly congested. The 5GHz isn’t too bad esp. when using the higher channels. I suspect it could simply be congestion.
Also the radios throughput is considerably lower than competitive products even under the best situations.
After months of fighting it and loosing a lot of clients… Mikrotik confirmed it was repeatable… And nothing could be done.
We had to give in and accept that Mikrotik wireless was stuck in 2014. And that while caps-man was great for management… The radios were not up to the task.
This is what I feared… that said, getting >100Mbps in a bar is more than acceptable but this leaves a rather bitter taste. I want to really like Mikrotik but this is disappointing.
Had to replace cAP ACs and wAP ACs across the board… Residential and commercial. It was a very expensive lesson.
I hope that the network can be at least stable.
When you say there is a problem with Wi-Fi - is that the chipset used or the Linux OS driver? Would going to v7 help?
There are three AP covering the bar - whilst it’s a big bar, I suspect we are a little OTT here and they could get away with two. So I’m tempted to take one down from the ceiling and bring it back so I can experiment and see what kind of speed I can get in the “lab”.
Disabling CAPSMAN won’t be the end of the world. There are only four AP in total. Once again, is CAPSMAN any better in v7?
The site I alluded to about with EOL Unif AP - I was tempted to replace them by Mikrotik as they now have a Mikrotik router (which works wonderfully). In light of this discussion, I might review that decision and stick with UniFi and the controller running on a laptop.
Love Router OS but as I type more here, I’ve always been disappointed in their Wi-Fi performance even on Wi-Fi 4 equipment. Cheap TP-Link access points can regularly get 50-70Mbps when close to the router. Mikrotik Wi-Fi always seemed a little lower
What did you expect?
Have you seen anyone here in the last two years recommending MT wifi 5 hardware??
Capac is rated at 867 advertised speeds at 5ghz, the best you can do is approx 1/3 of advertised speeds.
thus you should be getting around 289 in a one way test. That is assuming a stable connection at full potential.
With my same vintage tplink eap245v3 (wifi5) I am getting around 400-500 downloads and uploads.
If you want performance for a business dont cheap out and get at least wifi6 ( a couple of HD620s would do it easy peasy up and running in 5 minutes, customers satisfied, and you can get on with life, dont waste another second of your time and get your reputation back )
Have you seen anyone here in the last two years recommending MT wifi 5 hardware??
I don’t spend my entire life in here…
Capac is rated at 867 advertised speeds at 5ghz, the best you can do is approx 1/3 of advertised speeds.
thus you should be getting around 289 in a one way test. That is assuming a stable connection at full potential.
Which would be fine as that’s the kind of speeds I get here sat here right now under a VERY expensive Meraki access point with a 1Gbps backbone. But I’ve never seen >200Mbps with the Meraki access points.
If you want performance for a business dont cheap out and get at least wifi6
This is public Wi-Fi in a bar so is perfectly fit for purpose but still doesn’t stop me being curious.
I have just done a search on Wi-FI performance here and there are posts about performance issues with specific Router OS versions which suggests to me the problem is, partially, software related. Is the Wi-Fi chipset in the cAP ac the problem? I’ve read of Wi-Fi performance problems in Linux generally over the years so wouldn’t be surprised if it’s kernel related. Might have a go at upgrading one of them to v7 which I believe is built on a more modern kernel?
Most having issues on ROS7 with 5GHz see them not disappear but it least it gets better going back to ROS6.
Which version, seems to depend from device to device.
Some need to go back to even 6.48., others can use latest 6.49.2.
On the other hand, I am sure there are far more NOT reporting any problems because there aren’t any.
CAPsMAN is clearly the bottleneck in this set-up although why it was horribly low that night is still a mystery. I’ve disabled CAPsMAN on the nearest AP to the laptop I have access to remotely and throughput is consistently higher. It’s broken through 200Mbps and that’s through a wall. Windows is reporting a connection speed of 866Mbps which is the maximum rating of the cAP AP. When using CAPsMAN, it’s struggling to get above 120Mbps. The chipset in the cAP ac might be lagging compared to some others but 200Mbps is perfectly acceptable for this site. I think it’s been recognised that the Wi-Fi drivers in v6 aren’t optimal.
Whether this overload is outweighed by the ease of configuration depends upon the size of the installation. This site only has four AP so programming them manually isn’t that much of an overhead esp. as it can be scripted.
As CAPsMAN is AFAIK a software protocol, it is a perfectly reasonable question to ask whether performance has improved in v7.
Another aspect I’m going to investigate is the wider 5GHz spectrum. When I got the 200Mbps speed, I had manually set the channel to 36 with Ceee. I’m going to let it run free and use auto with XXXX. This means it tends to get one of the higher channels. Are there performance issues up there? I’d expect not as they are less congested but I’ve tweaked Wi-Fi enough to know things are often not as them might seem.
You didn’t respond to gotsprings’s comment about local forwarding. That could account for lower performance with CAPsMAN.
Thanks - I’d missed that, will have a look. Another bit of learning for me.
I happened to still have the remote session open at 1am before I went to bed - got well over 200Mbps and even hit 300Mbps once. Nobody else was using the network. This suggests that the problem is not specifically to do with the cAP ac themselves which is good to know. So keeps the finger pointing at either congestion over the air or performance of CAPsMAN when under load. As I part-time software developer, I can certainly accept that there could be performance problems in any bit of software. Mikrotik CPUs are good but not that good
Congestion over the air - I did do electrical engineering at uni but that was over 40 years ago so the knowledge is dim. I do understand how overlapping channels can impede throughput - and why access points on auto try to find the least congested channel.
But what I don’t know is does the 2.4GHz spectrum interfere with the 5Ghz spectrum? That’s where those 40 years are not helping me remember the basic theory.
“Manual channel planning yields better results than simple automation.” https://metis.fi/en/2018/10/rrm-en/ (and some other documents from Metis)
Problem is also that “auto” sometimes choses the energy dip between 2 non overlapping channels, creating a new channel overlapping with both other channels.
Co-channel interference is preferred. Adjacent (overlapping) channel interference is destructive, corrupting packets transmitted.
That interference goes further than the usuable range of an AP! If the (slow spead) header can be decoded, devices will wait, even if the (faster speed) message is not receivable.
Also using “auto” channel selection on Mikrotik is quite bad, because it evaluates channels based on number of APs, not signal strength. So it will choose channel with least amount of APs and happily select channel with one super strong AP. I haven’t tested wave2 if it’s any different in this regard.
There are higher harmonics, created by improper match between transmitter, feeder and antenna. Their frequency is multiple of base frequency, so 2.4GHz wifi transmitters can produce some noise in the band between 4.82GHz and 4.96GHz, which is luckily just below 5GHz band. 3rd harmonic falls to 7GHz+ (and is usually very much weaker).
Then there are RF mixer products (caused by non-linear faults due to some improper installations or faulty passive elements), the exact frequency emitted there is a bit more complicated to determine, but can fall into same band, and both lower and higher …
