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
.