I was struggling to figure out why my upload speed is below 200 Mbits/sec while the download is 500+ Mbits/sec, regardless of whether I use iPerf or Speedtest. The upload is always less than half of the download speed. I know on this forum, people often say, ‘Show us your config’ or ‘You must have done something wrong,’ but I have a very simple setup and have tried all possible solutions.
I almost came to the conclusion that MikroTik’s Wi-Fi is still terrible, like in the old days. I know that the IPQ-PPE chipset can’t have hardware offload due to a bug that the MikroTik team hasn’t fixed yet.
Today, I tried something new: I changed the interface queue for ether1 from ‘only-hardware-queue’ to ‘wireless-default.’ It could also be another custom queue type. Ether1 is the port where I connect my AX2/AX3 CAP to the main router. After making this change, the upload speed went back to around 480 Mbits/sec when the download was 500+ Mbits/sec. The problem was finally solved after months of research.
If you’re facing the same issue, this could save you a lot of time.
To test this, use iperf3 with a single thread for more accurate results:
iperf3 -c -P 1 -t 30000
iperf3 -c -P 1 -t 30000 -R