What country regulations limit is effective radiated power per device. Effective means it takes into account antenna gain so high antenna gain on transmitter will not present as higher signal strength[]. Per device means that it’ll sum over all transmit antennae and using many antennae (e.g. 4x4 MIMO or higher) will present as lower signal strength[**]. It will also mean that it will sum power per whole channel width. With wider channels power is dispersed more and signal strength will again be lower. So for best coverage use 1-chain AP with 20MHz channel width.
[] higher gain antenna does help to improve reception. Remember that obtainable throughput is related to SINR of receiver. Signal in receiver is sum of transmitter power (power amplifier), transmitter antenna gain, path loss and receiver antenna gain. Sum of first two is more or less EIRP and thus limited by country regulation, path loss is property of physical space between transmitter and receiver and receiver antenna gain is something that can be improved on certain devices. Higher gain antenna, by being directional (more or less), can also help to reduce noise part of SINR, but amount of reduction highly depends on overall situation around receiver.
When using higher gain antenna on AP downlink doesn’t change much (if at all): coverage is the same, service is the same (or slightly better; power amplifiers in low cost WiFi APs have “power backoff” meaning that when transmitting higher MCS/VHT, the power capability is lower. If country regulations limit Tx power lower than PA capability, then real power backoff happens at higher VHT or even doesn’t happen). However higher gain antenna helps in uplink, upload will be better because AP “hears better”. In case of PtP links, using higher fain antennae on both ends help improve both directions.
The power backoff explains why maximum throughput can be same on two APs with different signal strengths, specially if Tx power is set for maximum coverage area.
[**] using 4x4 (and higher order) MIMO offers some features which give better service outside best area of AP coverage (beam forming, space diversity). However, beacons are transmitted without using those tricks because they are intended also towards “about to register” clients (which are thus not yet known to AP) and towards dormant clients (which might have moved relatively to AP’s location but without gaving active two-way connection AP can not determine direction towards such client). So improvement is only seen during actual data transfers allowing for higher datarates at the same (marginal) signal strength.
The same applies to broadcast/multicast traffic if multicast helper is not enabled.
866 can be result of different connection properties … single chain, 80MHz and 256QAM. Or dual chain and 40MHz and 256QAM. Probably @bpwl could deduct more.
I have the same issue after upgrading to 7.7. TX Rate on 5Ghz went down from 1200Mbps to 800-400. Later the same day any of my devices weren’t able to see 5Ghz network at all.
Downgraded to 7.6 and everything works well now.
Opened ticket to support, let’s see what they will answer.
I had poor speed (35MB/s files copy from lan NAS) when 2.5Gbps was bridged with wireless.
Speed did go up to download=85MB/S upload=35MB/s after remove 2.5G port from bridge. I suspect this may be about default TX RX flow control (all off on interface).
My laptop wireless card is AX200, 1 wall between laptop and ax3, distance is about 4 meters.
Just reverse lookup is my tool. It is silly MT is not giving the input (bandwith or #tone, MCS HT/VHT/HE index, GI, #S), and so one has to match the rate with possible executions.
866.7 is 6 times in this table https://mcsindex.com/ (using ctrl-F text search) , some pre-802.11ax, some 802.11ax (ax has different Guard interval), not all settings are possible with MT (160MHz channel? , 8 antenna )
Mikrotik is adjusting wifiwave2 to the old wlan interface features. Hopefully one day also the registration table is the same (would love this for DUDE “Routeros info” global overview of the registration table, even as it misses MCS index)
Pay attention what country and channel is used. Not all channels are allowed to transmit whit hi power. Lower TX power will reduce range and modulation.
User reported Wifi issues on AX2 (same wifi as AX3) using ROS 7.7 yet the problem turned out to be related to Macbook.
Other test device, problem went away.
So once again my suggestion to ditch Apple
In all seriousness, to further pinpoint this problem, do you have the option to use another device for your testing ?
even run normally with v7.6
