Good day, everyone!
We’ve got a Mikrotik RB 2011UAS-2HnD, RouterOS 5.24.
Several laptops (different brands - Toshiba, Dell, Asus) have problems with wi-fi connection specifically with mikrotik device, other hotspots work ok.
Wi-Fi connection establishes and works ok, but periodically it disconnects for 10-15 seconds, then reconnects. On my Macbook the connection doesn’t break, however pings to mikrotik are higher (30 ms instead of 3) while other clients are disconnected.
Logging on Mikrotik is in debug mode, screenshot of what is written when the connection breaks is attached.
Please, help! Thanks a lot!
what are security settings? Try to use security - none
Security - WPA2 AES with key
I tried connecting with no security, with WPA - nothing changes.
We have had similar problems and I’m pretty sure that it’s due to the power-save settings of some wireless cards, especially those on smartphones and some laptops. Most other access point out there have a “DTIM” setting to control the frequency of sending broadcast/multicast packets to power-save mode clients; a greater interval will increase client battery life since those clients can turn off their receivers during that interval. Power-save aware clients will power down their radios after beacon, and willl only power them back up every (DTIM interval) x (beacon interval), so if DTIM interval of the AP is 2, clients will only power up their radios every other beacon. Read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delivery_traffic_indication_message
Mikrotik is (supposedly) working to fully support DTIM in ROS 6.x, but that may just be a rumor. We do have a workaround for the time being though. We tested with several different versions of ROS and multiple power-save aware devices and have found that the best combination to prevent power-save aware devices constantly disconnect is the following:
- ROS v5.24 (Multicast helper doesn’t seem to work on 6.0rc13 yet)
- Select Tx+Rx for both chains
- Set Multicast Helper to Full
At default wireless settings, we were constantly seeing disconnects and packet loss on smartphones and some laptops. It was only after my co-worker realized that he could only keep his laptop connected if he disabled power-save that we realized that might have something to do with it. We went through a lot of different combinations of settings until we found one that resulted in 0% packet loss.
Because there is no way to configure the beacon or DTIM interval on ROS yet, you will definitely notice a heavier drain on battery-powered devices connected to a Mikrotik AP relative to most others.
Hope this helps!