AP6-Pro requiring daily reboots

I just bought two new AP6-Pros and the 8 port POE switch. I like a lot about this system however I am finding that I have to reboot my AP (I only have one running at the moment as I need to run some cabling for the other) daily as the throughput reduces down to a meager 20Mbps frequently. The only thing I have found to fix it is to reboot the AP. Once I reboot it (by toggling the POE power on the switch port) it will instantly go back to the 500-600Mbps range for the remainder of the day… Any suggestions why this could be? Do I have a faulty AP?

Thanks,

Bryan

Hi @Bryan and welcome to the community!

When the speeds of the AP slow down, can you do a Full Scan through the cloud interface and post the results here, please? Also, is it seemingly random when the AP slows down or is it generally the same time every day?

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Hi @Alta-Matt_v2 ! Thank you for the quick response. I have attached the results of the full scan here. The last few days, the issue has presented itself first thing in the mornings when I sign on to start work however I have also seen this at other times though. I typically don’t ever see this more than once per day though which adds to the oddity of this.

Thanks!

Bryan

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Also, just for reference, here is a screenshot of a speed test (Comcast Xfinity) during the issue and after I reboot the AP:


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Interesting to see that the upload doesn’t seem to be proportionally affected.

I’m going to send you a DM to invite me to your site, the scanning didn’t quite yield what I was looking for.

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Apologies, I meant to post that publicly:

List of changes:

  • (Benign) There is no settings to correspond to the Red color code, yet Red was assigned to an AP, removed that. It should have absolutely zero impact
  • Your 2.4GHz spectrum to way too congested to be using 40MHz channel widths, bumped that down to 20MHz (see the note below regarding channel widths, how that affects speed and coverage)
  • Your 5GHz spectrum isn’t congested, but you’re using 160MHz channel widths there. About 25% of your network has received signal levels of -80 or worse.
    For 5GHz, I set the channel to 161 and lowered the channel width from 160MHz to 80MHz. In doing so, every client’s signal improved by at least 5dB

A little known caveat to channel widths is that the output power is spread across the channel width. For math’s sake, I’ll just say the maximum output power, speed, and range is 100 (metrics aren’t really relevant to this analogy.

  • At 20MHz, everything is at 100. Call this the baseline.
  • When you move to 40MHz, your output power is still 100, this will not change. Your speed is now 200, your range is now 50.
  • When you move to 80MHz, your output power is still 100, your speed is now 400, your range is now 25.
  • When you move to 160MHz, your output power is still 100, your speed is now 800, your range is now 12.5.

While this analogy is linear, in the real world, there’s some fuzziness but this is just a way to represent what’s going on.

This is why the general trend is to put more APs in a particular space, channel planning accordingly, to obtain the best of both world; speed vs. range.

Is this a sure fire fix? No, but it will be an improvement.

I suspect what was happening is that some or most devices (particularly anything mobile) would get out of range of 5GHz and drops to 2.4GHz, so you move from a clean band at 160MHz to a very congested band at 40MHz and that will definitely impact your speeds. Hopefully with this change, you won’t see that happen as we’ve effectively sacrificed a bit of speed for the sake of range.

You’ll always have some clients that will hang on to 5GHz more than they should, as well. To protect your privacy, I’ll just throw some examples without going into detail, but you can see this for yourself in the devices tab. First, I’d recommend going to Settings → System → WiFi Signal → Change to Raw, then return to your devices table. You’ll note that Google and Roku are hanging on to 5GHz and they really shouldn’t be with those poor signals. As a general rule, you want to be -75 or better on the client signal.

My recommendation would be to add an AP roughly where those clients with the worst signals are located if at all possible. I see you have another AP that’s currently offline so hopefully that’s something that can be easily done.

At any rate, give it a go over the weekend and let me know the outcome. Improved, no change, degraded, but at minimum, I’d expect a decent improvement.

Also, if you want to boot me from your site now, that’s fine :grin:.

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For the sake of the community and since it contains no private information, this was the OP’s reply via DM.

Thanks for this great info Matt! You are awesome. I do have plans to add the other AP (and maybe more pending the outcome of my longer term experience with these AP’s) but need to run some cabling first. The interesting thing about this is that when this happens, I am testing on a device connected via the 5Ghz band. The 2.4Ghz band is faster if I force that connection. The device I am testing from is literally 3 feet away from the AP as well!
I will give this a go over the weekend and circle back!

This makes sense to a degree. With the bulk of the poor signal clients being 5GHz, they’re going to likely take more airtime with retries and dropped frames, so 5GHz could feasibly perform worse than 2.4GHz. 2.4GHz was not free of clients with poor signals coupled with 40MHz wide channels in significantly more congestion is where I’m left scratching my head a bit as how it could outperform 5GHz/160MHz wide channels/almost no congestion. I guess we’ll see how the changes I made work out for the root issue.

Ultimately, we want to get all clients at a -75 signal or better. And that’s borderline impossible when you have vendors that seem to stick to 5GHz if it’s present at all, even at -87 signal which is just lunacy when there’s 2.4GHz available and 20db better, but hey, we have to play the hand we’re dealt, right?

Let me know how it goes, hopefully performance stays high. If not, I have a few other tricks up my sleeve :wink:

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Thanks again @Alta-Matt_v2 - I will circle back in a few days when I have given these changes enough of a chance to prove themselves out!

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