R700 + 9.8 = 5 GHz Radio issues?

[brian_hoyt_6612]

It appears there a re significant problems with R700 5 GHz radio that have existed in code base since 9.8 was released and they continue or are even worse in 9.8.2. The radios rebooted, background scanning / channelfly doesn't work and now my clients just mysteriously drop off. For now I have disabled the 5 GHz radios on R700 to get reliable coverage which means I don't have 802.11ac of course. This is happening on all sort of devices. Has anyone else seen similar issues? I will open a case when I can troubleshoot it and not disturb clients.

[michael_brado]

Yes it is software and not the R700 ac radio/antenna hardware that is behind the other, with
added features in each sw release. Seeing the APs all using the same channel 149 for 5G indicates
that background scanning is not enabled. We recommend enabling the Channelfly self-healing algorithm
for a period of hours (typically), then disable it again, for R700 5G channels to be optimized for client use.
If you have frequent client connection problems, please open a ticket with Tech Support for a deeper analysis.

[brian_hoyt_6612]

It doesn't appear this improves much with 9.9 either given this list:
The following features are not included in this release:
• Airtime Fairness on 5 GHz radio
• Smart Mesh
• Spectrum Analysis on 5 GHz radio
• WLAN prioritization on 5 GHz radio
• Packet Capture on 5 GHz radio
From the release notes.

What is the point of having 802.11ac access points if many of the features are disabled on 5 GHz radios since 2.4 GHz don't support ac?

[john_d]

Speaking from my experience, despite the things you mention missing from the 5GHz radio, side by side comparison between my R600/R700 and the ZF7982 in two sites consistently show that the AC stuff has superior 5GHz throughput whether you're close or far away from the AP. It would definitely be nice to have ATF, background scanning, and meshing but even without that, the performance is significantly improved in my experience, and the reliability is about the same.

I've not seen clients mysteriously drop off. I had some broadcast/multicast reliability issues with 9.8.0/9.8.1 standalone which seem fixed per the 9.8.2 release notes, but with a ZD it's been consistently solid since the R700's release.

Can you elaborate on your 5GHz issues (such as how BG scanning / channel fly don't work, and specifically what kind of client drop issues you are noticing with which devices?), because as you mentioned, it's kind of unfortunate if you have to disable 5GHz since all of the advantages of R700 are with its 5GHz radio.

[brian_hoyt_6612]

I will try to elaborate on my issues more to help explain. This year we got our first 802.11ac devices in a dozen Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga using Intel 7260 chipset and 35 Microsoft Surface Pro 3 using Marvell chipset. In an attempt to best support them and thanks to a nice deal I got 5 R700 AP to replace in the parts of my building that support those devices. We had some issues initially with the SP3 machines which I thought was due to driver issues. These issues were mainly an inability to connect to wireless after resuming from sleep. Then with each progressive 9.8.x code release it seemed the problems got worse. You might say don't apply updates but in many cases there were specific fixes for R700 radio issues that I thought would improve issues. With the 9.8.2 release I started having clients that couldn't connect at all or couldn't stay connected. I could start a ping on a device to our DNS and would have over 75% packet loss and sometimes would just drop off completely. Neither the laptop nor the ZD would say the device had disconnected, rather traffic would simply stop. I also had devices that were flagged as failing authentication repeatedly and being locked out which was new with the 9.8.2 release. Right before our holiday break I disabled the 5 GHz radios on the R700 (leaving them active on our zf7363) and this week while doing online testing and having maximum device connected I have had almost zero issues and those I did have were easily and quickly resolved as client issues. This is what leads me to the conclusion that the R700 5 GHz radios pretty much don't work. At this time I can't risk further service disruptions for testing purposes and can't enable radios for testing. Once I have a window I can I will follow up with a ticket to Ruckus.