R510 5ghz abysmal

[bubbagump210]

Perhaps some kind soul can clarify something for me. I have two R510s covering roughly 3000 sqft. 2.4ghz coverage seems reasonable. I was under the impression that the Unleashed mesh would handle roaming and essentially be an Eero/Velop equivalent. However, it seems it is really just unified management and smart shifting of the controller role should an AP fail. Is this correct? Assuming yes, it seems I need to get armpit deep in site surveys and radio tuning like the old days to get this to work well which is a shame as I was hoping for plug and go. Any thoughts or relevant docs on the subject?

[bubbagump210]

I think i may fundamentally not understand something... must an AP be within radio reach of the next AP, even if they are hardwired roots, for a mesh to work? As an example, here is the site survey of the first floor:



There is plenty of coverage. HOWEVER, where the APs are positioned there is nearly no reach between the APs as I expected the wired network communication to allow the two APs to negotiate things.



Can someone clarify? Must two APs be able to communicate via 5ghz and not only by ethernet in order for mesh to work? Or is a wired communication link for the mesh acceptable? Two roots seems to line up perfectly with the "Standard" model in the docs, thus my bewilderment if 5ghz between APs is necessary.

[bubbagump210]

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203068  < I think this may be thee issue. I need more overlap as I am dancing around -65db at my over lap point causing the iOS devices to flap.

[john_d]

As I mentioned before I honestly don't think you have enough coverage to get 5GHz everywhere. 5GHz has a hard time penetrating walls and iOS devices in particular have built in logic such that when you're in motion and 5GHz coverage isn't super strong, it will proactively downgrade to 2.4 and stay there until you're still again, to avoid walking outside of 5GHz coverage areas.

All vendors are limited by the same FCC power limits. Some products (especially with third party wifi firmware installed) simply turn a blind eye to regulatory limits if the user configures them to transmit at a higher power and you can squeeze a bit more out of 5GHz but that's not really a good idea.

You could potentially improve your 5GHz coverage by using the channels that permit slightly higher transmit powers -- in the US that's channels 100 and above (149-157 have the highest transmit power allowed but that spectrum is shared with many other high transmit power wireless sources of interference, 100-132 hit a sweet spot if you don't live near an airport and have devices that all support DFS, and 36-48 were recently allowed by the FCC to use higher transmit powers but not all APs have adopted those changes -- for Ruckus it seems like their .ax and some of the newest Wave2 devices did adopt the higher powers but not anything Wave1 or older)

[bubbagump210]

I think it may well be the opposite. I lowered one AP's TX by 6db and I am seeing significantly better behavior. I think that -65 threshold on iOS is the culprit.

For example, you might design 5 GHz cells that have a -67 dBm overlap. In this case, the device keeps its connection to the BSSID longer than you expect.

That is right where I was at. We shall see how this works for a bit. I ass-umed Unleashed would work around this automagically - nope. They're just another AP seemingly in this regard. Re channels, the APs are automatically choosing 100+. 112 and 124 at the moment FWIW.

[hayward_kong]

You can also check out smart roaming feature....not sure it’s in unleashed GUI yet, but it should be in CLI.

check out this,discussion..
https://forums.ruckuswireless.com/ruc...