We populate RB230 boards with Prism cards, running 2.9.7. We pipe out two T1 lines, so our users can never get more than 1.5Mbit down or up. My questions:
1 - on INTERFACE WLAN - what should I set the data rates to? default or configured? what’s the difference?
2 - On Supported vs basic rates, what’s the difference? I want every user to have a 1Mbit up/down potential, without hurting other clients. does that mean set each of these to 1Mbit?
3 - It is my goal to allow every user to connect at 1Mbit. I have 49 users on this sector. Some people don’t connect very well. If I keep the connection down to 1, instead of 11, won’t I get better range and performance?
This all depends on the network. Usually you set the data rates to configured if you have long distance links that can’t consistantly achieve the max data rates and then jump from data rate to date rate increasing latency on the client. When you see this you should set your default data rates accordingly. For our 802.11b access points I usually uncheck the 11mbps under supported as our highest plan offers 2mbps.
Supported are the data rates a client can obtain when connected to that AP. Basic is the data rate the client will first try to negotiate at and is the minimum data rate the client can have. It is not recommended to change this from its default (1mbps). If you want to make changes, change the supported rates. Also if you’re trying to achieve 1mbps max for the clients you’ll want to take in account overhead for various protocols that might run on the network, so allowing users to connect at higher data rates would help with that. I’d say check 1mbps, and 2mbps for the supported rates.
You need a higher quality signal to achieve the higher data rates so locking the AP down to 1mbps might increase the signal levels of some clients. It’s tough to guage the performance delta, but I doubt it would get any worse. Like I said perviously you may want to allow 1mbps, and 2mbps to take in account for protocol overhead.
Also doing bandwidth mangement via the mikrotik is a good idea, setup simple queues for each user capping them at 1mbps (or whatever their plan). Protocol based bandwidth management is also a big help this way you can keep bandwidth hungry application such as peer2peer apps from saturating your T1’s.
I appreciate your response. I am testing dropping the rates to 1,2,5.5 and basic of 1. right off the bat, when I did this, I saw signal strength drop to -100 on about half the clients. I suspect this is due to inactivity, and perhaps once they start using it again it will give us real numbers?
Do you have any experience with setting values for DEFAULT AP Tx RATE and DEFAULT CLIENT Tx RATE? By default they are blank. I am just trying to think of ways to keep radio traffic down so my poor little prism cards won’t fault.
I am begining to suspect latency on one particular sector is due to too many clients connecting. I use RB230 with all three card slots populated, and running 120 sector antennas. one of my sectors has 49 clients. I wonder if it’s just too much for the card to handle. The CPU utilization looks fine, but I think the firmware is old: 1.1.0/1.7.4, compid 0x800c. I just don’t know how to upgrade the prism firmware from the Mikrotik. All I know is to hike to the tower, pull the cards, put em in my laptop (XP PRO) and upgrade em from there (thus, the reason why it hasn’t been done)
Thanks for sharing your knowledge.