R730 Wi-Fi stability with Apple devices

[dynamic97]

Hello,

I recently setup a R730 for my home (office) Wi-Fi. I'm coming from a Meraki MR52.

tl;dr mr52 slower but more stable, r730 faster but stability issues with 5 GHz connection dropping periodically on devices

I'm using the Solo firmware for a simple setup: 1 x 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi network and 1 x 5 Ghz Wi-Fi network.

Initial performance was bad, but that was my fault - my unmanaged PoE switch doesn't do L2 LLDP. I had to ssh into the ruckus-cli on the AP and manually switch the power mode. My switch is 802.3at but supports up to 30W per port so 802.3bt worked for max performance.The switch reports around 12W used by the AP during regular usage (i.e. no bench marking)

I ran into some more issues, first issue was channel constantly changing when channel selection was set to auto. Is this supposed to happen? I thought the AP would scan and pick the best channel and only change with significant interference. Also does radio power scale dynamically?

Used a Wi-Fi scanner and selected an open channel with minimal neighbors. The stability issue from switching channels resolved.

Some devices seemed to have issues with particular channels. Picking a more conservative channel solved this issue. Ex: older Android device couldn't connect to 5 GHz with channel 157 but had no problem with channel 52.

Speeds were fast, qualitative example, I was able to max out my 600/50 internet connection over Wi-Fi with speedtest. This has never happened before on my laptop (2018mbp), my server hardwired at 1Gbps can easily of course - which I use at the iperf3 server for bench-marking Wi-Fi bandwidth.

I haven't been able to figure out why my laptop and phone (iPhone) occasionally lose 5Ghz Wi-Fi network and have to pick up 2.4Ghz. This is quite problematic as it drops open network sessions and network folders/drives.

For now, I'm back to the MR52. Have a R720 on the way to try with Unleashed - perhaps that will fix my issues? I'm also considering a ZoneDirector1200 with the R730 but I'm not a fan of more power usage - I'm running my network on solar + wind so I count each watt as it affects uptime during battery usage.

Appealing to the experienced experts here to help point out issues with my config so I can maximize stability and performance with the R720/R730.

[sanjay_kumar]

Hi @dynamic97 
I would recommend to try Unleashed and check the client stability issue.
For the speed test, instead of using Speed test for bandwidth performance test (which is between the client and the internet), Unleashed as a feature called Speedflex (under clients tab by selecting a client). This will tell the speed result between the AP and the Client.

Regarding the channel switching, we might need to check the interference level the AP is having on the 5 Ghz, we would need to look into the AP support logs.

So first try the Unleashed with and then let us know so that we can check on the logs and see what AP is experiencing and the client condition.

[dynamic97]

Thats cool @sanjay_kumar , looking forward to testing R720 with Unleashed and Speedflex.

To test bandwidth I've been using iperf3 in the following setup

client: 2018 macbook pro connected via 5GHz WiFi

server: linux server hardwired at 1Gbps

client <-wifi-> AP <-1 Gbps ethernet-> PoE switch <-1 Gbps ethernet-> linux server

I believe this is fairly accurate though it likely bottlenecks since I'm seeing greater than 1 Gbps Tx rate while connected to APs, maxing at 1300 Mbps Tx rate.

Can't wait for the R720 to arrive!