The problem I’m seeing on my hAP ax3 is that the signal strength(reach) is not much better on 2ghz than it is on 5ghz. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem but when your main seating location falls within this range you get disconnects and constant flapping between the two radio’s. I still have my old hAP ac2 as a backup and this never gave any issues with the same wifi configuration(other than the driver)
I’ve seen too many complaints with the same hardware to assume it is configuration based and I’ve tried so many different things that I’m now just going to leave it in the hope it improves with future updates.
I dropped tx-power on the 2GHz radio to 12 so that clients prefer the 5GHz radio. It doesn’t seem to affect 2.4GHz connectivity much when you’re far enough away for the 5GHz signal to be attenuated.
You could try to “push” clients to 5GHz using access-list rules. I constructed a set of rules on my Audience (ac device running wifiwave2 in ROS v7.:
add action=reject allow-signal-out-of-range=10s comment="kick clients with too good signal, hopefully they'll reconnect on 5GHz AP" interface=wifi-2G signal-range=-65..120
add action=accept interface=wifi-2G
add action=reject allow-signal-out-of-range=10s interface=wifi-5G signal-range=-120..-80
add action=accept interface=wifi-5G
Before I did these rules, some of wireless clients sticked to 2.4GHz band no matter what. With these settings, they are kicked to 5GHz band. The cut-off value (-65dBm in my example) has to be set according to Tx power of both bands and the point where 5GHz signal drops below usable level, my device is operating at default (i.e. maximum allowed) Tx powers.
The problem: as it seems now, rules work fine when device does initial connection to the AP. However, it doesn’t get kicked off 2.4GHz channel if the signal level raises above the threshold. I haven’t done thorough testing yet, but with default logging config nothing is in logs that would indicate that AP is trying to kick off the “offending” device.
So I wonder if failing to kick off the device is a bug in wifiwave2 driver or error in my config?
There is no signal range on your accept ACL rules. So the device will stick under all signal conditions on that accept rule, once it gets there,
That is when it did not match (even just once) the reject rule in your list.
reject signal range = -120..-66
accept signal range = -65..120
… the accept rule will now stop when below -65 dBm for longer than the ‘allow-signal-out-of-range’ time, And the rules will be re-evaluated, top down when reconnecting.
Right. I adjusted the rules that did not include signal-range to have one. Will test and report back.
Edit:
Here’s report: I had to roll back the ACL changes.
My daughter has a Nokia 7.1 android phone which seemingly doesn’t like being kicked off. After being kicked off it started to see two wireless networks with same SSID (one formed by Audience and one formed by other, older, APs without ACL set up) and wouldn’t connect to either of them. After phone was restarted it connected Audience (its signal was strongest) and would drop very soon. After ACL setup roll-back and phone restart, everything returned to normality (it took a while longer for daughter’s mood to pick up again).
I just got an ax3 as a drop-in replacement for a hap ac and quickly discovered the poor wifi bandwidth issue discussed in this thread. Using the same test devices (Samsung Galaxy s10e, Windows 11 PC with Intel Killer wifi 6E ax1675x adapter, and Microsoft Surface w/ Intel wireless) from the same locations, using Speedtest to the same server, the ax3 has 1/4 the wifi bandwidth of the ac (51 mb/s vs 222 mb/s). I am just starting the process of figuring out why, but my first question/issue is chains. The Mikrotik specs say the ax3 has 2 chains for 2G and 2 for 5G. Winbox-wireless-radios show 0-1 for both tx and rx for both 2G and 5G. In addition, I cannot change the chains configuration. When I try, the interface gets removed and an error “chains not supported” is displayed in its place. So, my first question is why the radios show 0-1 chains. It implies that there could be two chains which would probably be shown as 1-1. On the other hand, 1 chain for rx and one chain for tx might meet the spec for 2 chains (with a little deceptive marketing).
As background, the ac and ax3 are/were configured as access points only. Both are/were directly connected to a CCR-1009-7G which is directly connected to my cable modem. Everything Mikrotik is running v7.8. I have tried to match the ac and ax3 configurations as closely as possible.
Gripe paragraph: Given the wifi bandwidth issues, the discovery that old capsman does not support the ax3 and the new capsman does not support my other 7 ap’s, I am really disappointed with the ax3. I can live with having to separately configure the ax3 with no capsman, but cannot live with 1/4 the wifi bandwidth.
54C. I do not know how to put it under load but typically there are only about 6 wifi clients at a time and three clients connected via ethernet ports. In other words, it is never highly loaded.
I thought I posted the following but do not see it so here I go again.
I ran a bunch of btest’s involving 2 hap ac’s and the ax3. All of them flow through the CCR router. The results are mysterious but maybe related to the wifi issues.
AC1 ↔ AC2
sending @ 755Mb/s
receiving @ 790Mb/s
it does not matter which AC runs the client
Any AC ↔ AX3
client on AC
– sending @ 95Mb/s
– receiving @ 945Mb/s
Notice the order of magnitude difference between sending and receiving when the ax3 is involved. The ax3 has been connected to the ccr via ether1 (2.5G) or one of the 1G ethernet ports with no change in results. Any explanation or suggestions are appreciated.
The old hAP ac (not the new ac2 variant) has 3 chains on 5GHz radio and has thus up to 1300Mbps interface rate. hAP ax3, OTOH, has only 2 chains and thus supports up to 866Mbps interface rate (if running in ac compatibility)or 1200Mbps interface rate (if running in ax mode). All numbers are for 80MHz channel, according to specs hAP ac doesn’t support 160MHz channels.
So yes, one does wonder how on Earth can AC<->AX work at such a high rate.
Those who have poor throughput performance, what PHY speed do you see? I use ax3 whit capsman v2 and performance is great. Real wold speeds are around 500-600mbps in the same room/open space. ac2 performance was x2 slower as capsman v1 throughput is around 350mbps (80mhz channel).
AC with VHT goes up to 866Mbps interface rate with 2-stream on 80 MHz bandwidth (using 256QAM). The well known limit.
AX with HE goes up to 1024 QAM encoding and has wider channels (see mcsindex table for interface rates
Other stream combinations are in the mcsindex table.
What is the AC 80+80 (primary + secondary) doing, in performance ?
In practice, and that practical limit is strong with MT classic drivers, the net data transfer rate is reduced because the air-time is shared among all transmitters in the channel, and the channel-contention process requires gaps between successive transmissions.
With small transmission packets, the gap loss for every transmission in VHT becomes very important with higher rates. Classic MT drivers have small A-MSDU (MPDU) and small A-MPDU, and don’t use the standard large transmissions. http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/wifiwave2-expected-performance/160075/3 The impact of this on the data rate can be calculated
Yes, I meant LAN only. For now, I have taken wifi out of my investigation, although I wonder if the LAN-only weirdness is related to my poor wifi performance. Sorry for all the confusion.
according to specs hAP ac doesn’t support 160MHz channels.
But AFAIK it does support 80+80MHz. 80+80 = Primary+secondary.
The “secondary” option appears in Winbox only when 20/40/80 bandwidth is choosen.
The secondary channel is 80MHz only. (No Ceee notation, so maybe they use the mid-freq notation only for the secondary (as specified in HELP for wifiwave2)
WLAN:
secondary-channel (integer; Default: "")
Specifies secondary channel, required to enable 80+80MHz transmission. To disable 80+80MHz functionality, set secondary-channel to "" or unset the value via CLI/GUI.
wifiwave2:
secondary-frequency (list of integers | 'disabled')
Frequency (in MHz) to use for the center of the secondary part of a split 80+80MHz channel.
Only official 80MHz channels (5210, 5290, 5530, 5610, 5690, 5775) are supported.
Leave unset (default) for automatic selection of secondary channel frequency.
With my Surface I see tx-516, rx=344. Running a Speedtest, I get 94Mb/s down, up is capped at 18Mb/s. Running Speedtest connected to a hap ac I get 134Mb/s down. Last week I was at a location with wifi6 (I do not know the equipment) and I got 392Mb/s down.
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